Participation from the Top: COSI and The Wild Center

(This section clearly speaks to the wide range of use of the strategic tool called participation. These case studies are compelling and rich. I am wondering about positioning this closer to the front of your chapter.  It helps to see that participation has many applications. Its introduction into an institution is most successful when it is integral, when it is helping to solve the problems that have been identified.

Although I like the small chapter parts in terms of being able to edit one piece at a time, I know I am missing the big picture of this chapter until I get through it all. SB)

    If you want to engage museum directors and trustees in the conversation about participatory practice, you have to expand your arguments to address its strategic value to entire institutions. Participation isn't just about enhancing the visitor experience. Just as participatory techniques can make museum content more relevant to visitors, they can also make institutional goals more relevant and compelling to stakeholder communities, including the civic and community leaders. While some leading-edge institutions have received major media attention for their participatory efforts, for most institutions good press is not as useful as establishing strong and sustaining community relationships. You don't need to be a big museum or a radical innovator for participatory techniques to positively enhance your institution's strategic community value. Let's take a closer look at two institutions that have done just that--COSI Columbus in Columbus, Ohio, and The Wild Center in Tupper Lake, New York.

    COSI Columbus is an interactive science center in the middle of the US that has been using participatory techniques to position itself into the city as an essential community hub of science and learning activity. Their participatory strategy grew out of crisis. In 2005, a bond measure to support the institution failed, and the museum struggled to stay open. As then-new CEO David Cheseborough put it: "We had to readdress our value proposition and start raising serious money immediately. Historically, COSI had been really focused all on attendance, and everything was skewed in that direction. But I was out there in the community raising millions, and to do that, we had to be putting forward a community-focused value proposition, demonstrating that COSI was a valuable community asset and investment."

    How did Cheseborough's team demonstrate that "COSI was a valuable community asset and investment?" They embarked on a broad slate of collaborative and co-option projects meant to establish stronger ties with the city's science-oriented academic, business, and learning sectors. With academics, COSI established research centers in the public galleries to give child development and physiology researchers the opportunity to study visitors and work with them on citizen science projects. (did this have to go through an IRB since it involved human subjects?  MK) COSI also used a co-option model to rent 12,000 square feet of gallery space to the local public TV and radio station, WOSU, which began broadcasting and holding public programs at COSI in 2008. WOSU and COSI partnered to host social media meetups, tech events, and other events that brought together technologists, non-profit groups, and digital media enthusiasts. COSI connected the dots between their own work educating children, entrepreneurs seeking to promote Columbus as a technology hub, and public media producers to become a center of learning, press, and community.

    Finally, Cheseborough empowered his staff to engage with visitors and Columbus residents directly in new participatory ways, both on the web and at the museum. In the museum, along with their new partners, COSI staff offered new opportunities for visitors to engage in dialogue about tough topics like science and religion and to contribute to real scientific studies. On the web, COSI became a leader in the science center field, providing content in several social networks for both casual visitors and program participants to get and stay connected to each other, sharing everything from exhibit plans to director’s thoughts to collaborative project experiences.

    COSI's new connections to social media haven’t just motivated visits; they also brought in a new cadre of enthusiastic volunteers. As Kelli Nowinsky, manager of public relations, explained, "The main goal of all the social media tools is that we want to engage more people with our mission, people who might not have had a touchpoint with COSI before. For example, a guy I met through Twitter asked me to meet in person. At first, I was skeptical because I thought he wanted to talk to me about the COSI website. When he expressed he just wanted to talk about ideas he had for COSI, we met for coffee. He pulled out this notebook with all these ideas and asked, ‘how can I help with the innovation showcase?’ I was blown away. He did not want anything in return. Here I am sitting with this person who is a young professional without children, someone who would never have engaged with COSI before we got involved in social media. Now we are building a professional relationship and talk all the time about how he can help us in our social media efforts and help us reach out to the tech community."

    COSI used strategic co-option of facility resources, collaboration with aligned, new partners, and energetic engagement with Columbus residents to turn around their position in the city. None of these actions were ground-breaking, but collectively, they changed the value proposition of an institution that just a few years earlier was seen by voters as irrelevant to life in Columbus. They found ways to engage new participants and partners, and now, they are relevant not only to their core family and school audiences but to a much wider audience of young professionals as well.

    The Wild Center's story didn't start with the same dire straits that plagued COSI Columbus, but with a strategic goal to engage community members around one specific issue of concern: the effect of climate change on the Adirondacks. The Wild Center is a natural history museum which opened in 2006 with a small indoor exhibit and 31 acres of trails with interpretative material. It is open seasonally and mostly visited by summer tourists and part-time Adirondack residents. But the Wild Center staff were not content to be a once-a-year attraction; instead, they wanted their institution to become a central hub for action on issues of human coexistence with nature. The mission of the institution is to "ignite an enduring passion for the Adirondacks where people and nature can thrive together and set an example for the world," and staff believe that igniting passions and setting examples cannot happen passively. The Wild Center staff, led by director Stephanie Ratcliffe, have taken on climate change in particular as an issue they felt was not receiving the local attention it deserved from both a business and environmental perspective. The staff saw the Adirondacks as a kind of social object around which broader dialogue about environmental impact could occur.

    In 2008, The Wild Center hosted a series of climate conferences that focused on economic models for local businesses and governments not just to survive but to succeed in a world of climate change. These were dialogue events that brought academic and industry leaders in science policy and sustainable business together with local politicians, business owners, and builders. Yes, they talked about the gloom and doom, but they focused very locally on the Adirondacks and ways that positive action on climate issues could improve town function and business efficiency.

    The climate conferences have become a core part of the Wild Center's strategic efforts to accomplish its mission to present the Adirondacks as a model for human integration with nature. The events helped established The Wild Center as a national player, and equally importantly, as a local community resource. A local blogger celebrated one of the green building events at the Wild Center, saying: "Two years ago I was lamenting that no local public leaders were stepping up to the plate on trying to understand what global climate change would mean for the Adirondacks (and its ski-tourism industry) - thankfully, that has changed. The Wild Center in Tupper Lake has taken on the lead role of informing their neighbors about the potential impacts of global warming (such as the impact on amphibians), showing local builders what they can do to mitigate those affects, and organizing scientific meetings to discuss and assess the progress of climate change in the Adirondacks." Participating in this highly strategic way with community members in the Wild Center's geographic area has enabled this small, young institution to become a powerful voice of and for its constituents.

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