After an inspirational session with the innovators network heritage (INE) yesterday, in which we discussed past successes and future plans for cultural world domination, I thought it would be nice to forget the debates about open linked data and digital sustainability for a while, and look back at the core of our job: innovation.

Below is a list of some of the core points that are good to be reminded of every now and then related to innovation. What is it, where does it come from and what can it bring us? Some of the points are apparently obvious, others less so and might be project or organisation specific. I’d love to hear your take on innovation in the comments.

1. Innovation is the process from idea to delivery. As a friend once told me, ideas are as abundant as successfully finished projects are rare.
2. Innovation starts with observation. As Geoff Mulgan writes, “Innovators generally have a wide peripheral vision, and they are good at spotting how apparently unrelated methods and ideas can be used togethers.” This means a good innovator is usually a generalist, has an eye for detail and great curiosity about how things work.
3. Innovation is often obvious. Don’t discard ideas because they seem too simple, they might never have been tried before. Or as the late Peter Drucker said, “The greatest praise an innovation can receive is for people to day, ‘This is obvious! Why didn’t I think of it? It’s so simple!’”
4. Innovation can happen anywhere in your organisation. Probably, your biggest win isn’t to be found in the social media department, but it doesn’t hurt to let them look (together with communications, collections, programming, sales, etc.).
5. A business model is part of every innovation. If an innovation isn’t meant to add some real value to the visitor’s experience, collection management, the budget or something else, it’s just a crazy idea getting too much attention.
6. It’s better to disrupt the market, than your audience. As every Facebook lay-out update shows, change always upsets people. Make sure you upset the right people, or as Clayton M. Christensen writes, “[Innovators] should try to disrupt their competitors, never their customers.”
7. Innovation can be high-risk or low-risk, but there’s always a risk. Risk-free innovation is like money-free poker: if you can’t lose you can’t win. No pain, no gain.
8. Returns are relative to the risk taken. High-risk innovation (expensive R&D departments, all-out bets) tends to yield higher potential returns than low-risk innovation (allowing staff to use 4 hours per week to try to do stuff differently).
9. Management and innovation are mutually exclusive. The problem with government innovation schemes, at least in the Netherlands? They usually ask for a planning and tangible outcomes. However, although innovation has tangible outcomes, it can never be sure what they will be at the outset, or innovation would be called project management. Also, you don’t want a manager to be too innovative, and an innovator to spent too much energy managing stuff.
10. Motivation is the key to innovation, for it focuses expertise and creative thinking. As Teresa M. Amabile writes, “People will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily by the interest, satisfaction and challenge of the work itself-and not by external pressures.”
11. Innovation thrives on differences between people. There’s a compelling TED talk by Geoffrey West on how in bigger cities, there’s a lot more of everything. One of these things is innovation: more different people means more chance encounters, random interactions, inspiration, innovation.

Of course, this is just the 101. All quotes are from the The Innovator’s Cookbook, a series of essays and interviews curated by “good ideas guru” Steven Johnson. It’s a book worth reading, as it goes into things as ‘crazy’ as the set up of a building and its influence on innovation. All this, certainly, will be dealt with in future classes, either here or elsewhere on the Internet. For now, I’m ready to take questions…;-)

Not too long ago, while reading The Ascent of Money, I had to refresh my memory about the events leading to the French revolution. The Wikipedia entry on the subject made me sad. Now I had to read two books. (The article alone is over 3,300 words long.)

I believe that on their way to perfection and completeness, Wikipedia is offering us at least 3 opportunities to shine: brevity, humour and passion.

1. Brevity

Due to its desire to tell the full story, Wikipedia is quickly becoming unusable for anything other than scholarly research. The length, depth and level of detail of many entries greatly surpasses the information needs if you just want to know a bit about the topic. The article on the causes of the French revolution is not at all a very long entry, yet already some thousand words longer than the average TED talk.

There is another way, which offers an opportunity to institutions with knowledge and creativity: videos. Take the Open University’s 60-Second Adventures in Thought about Schrödinger’s cat. In 81 seconds they manage to tell basically the same story as the 2,500-word Wikipedia entry. Plus, it made me laugh.

Most people don’t want to know about Schrödinger’s cat at all. And even if they might, it’s more likely they’ll start with the movie. Can’t get enough? Wikipedia’s there to tell you everything, but by then you’ve already become a scholar of parallel universes and quantum mechanics.

2. Humour (emotion)

Humour might even sell better than sex, and it certainly is a more tool for organisations aiming at families. Wikipedia’s tendency to perfection makes their articles rather dry. It’s facts, no fiction. A nice story, with a little laugh, might be way more engaging and reach a wider audience.

I immediately thought about the viral video of the Scheepvaartsmuseum in Amsterdam, which – although a promotional tool – tells the story of 400 years of Dutch naval history rather convincingly.

It doesn’t have to be video, though. Words can be just as convincing. There’s a reason I (and millions with me) spend good money on books by the likes of Niall Ferguson, Richard Dawkins and Alain de Botton. For the contents I might just as well read an encyclopaedia, but for a unique and upbeat story they’re the ones to go to.

3. Passion

This borders on passion. There’s no denying the Wikipedians are among the world’s most passionate people, even brave enough to take a stand against SOPA. An article on Wikipedia, however, is almost always a compromise between different, equally passionate people (it’s why the “talk” page is always so much more interesting than the article).

Like humour, passion is appealing, especially when your ‘product’ screams it. It’s why we buy Apple stuff and why it’s so nice to listen to Benjamin Zander or watch the promotional video for the Ship Song project. Passion is also in the choice of imagery, the decision to focus on some parts of a story and not on others. Passion is the curatorial hand that makes Wikipedia content irresistible.

The video above triggered me to write this post. It’s a video from an exposition at my previous museum. When I needed some facts about the Dutch Golden Age (its topic), I found it quicker in this video than on Wikipedia. I also noticed that since the exposition stopped, the video has had most of its views, and is embedded on a Dutch educational website for immigrants.

I firmly believe that there are much more people like me, who prefer a short, passionate and humorous video or text to the elaborate and perfect Wikipedia article. And there will be even more in the coming years. This is an opportunity we should not neglect.

Please share your ideas or examples of great video’s and articles by cultural institutions that add something to the Wikipedia entries in the comments.

“In the organisation of the future, the decisions that matter won’t be taken in some high-tech war room, but on the front line,” says Tim Harford in Adapt. You, more than your CEO, will determine the success of your museum’s next grand project. True, she gives you the direction and funds and – if you’re lucky – the mandate and freedom to design mind-blowing products, but it’s your creativity, cleverness and skill that will make a difference in the end. Here are 7 ways in which I try to stay on top of things, and come up with great ideas for future projects.

1. Plan playtime
   Is your calendar always full as well? Plan playtime. Playtime is not just time you leave empty to do whatever, that doesn’t work and you’ll probably sacrifice it to to-do’s anyway. Playtime is for instance 2 hours to go to a great store and look around, or an afternoon to go through your old notebooks.
2. Fill a random stuff folder
   I have a folder called “playground” in the root of my project folders. It’s my digital scrapbook, full of random stuff. In it, I don’t worry about design conventions, budget, or even copyright (sorry!). It’s simply random stuff, like the pieces of an as of yet unknown puzzle. Look through it repeatedly, and maybe the picture will become clear.
3. Learn basic coding and design tools
   The rapidest form of prototyping is the prototyping you can do yourself in playtime in the random stuff folder. But it’s not just knowing how to code a simple programme and design its front: simply learning about coding and design helps to spark creativity as well.
4. Buy a lot of books, and read some of them*
   One of my number one sources of inspiration are books. Unlike blogs, books don’t distract you with the features of the iPad 3, but usually focus on more important stuff. And when reading, read more than one book at once. I usually combine a (modern) classic with non-fiction and something “light” (biographies, theatre). You’d be surprised how many fresh ideas are hiding in Dickens.
5. “Avoid optimisation, learn to love redundancy”
   This quote by Nassim Nicholas Taleb is about doing more than what you’re good at anyway, even if it looks redundant. Why not run some similar projects or experiments at the same time, even though you only need one? There’s a bigger chance to pick something truly great when there’s more to choose from.
6. Put your ideas to the test
   No idea is full-grown and no project perfect at first try, or at least, none of mine are. Ask peers for feedback, talk about it at networking sessions, or do pilot runs with colleagues and visitors. Ideas grow and projects improve when people interact with them, and it’s better to start reaping the benefits of testing as early as possible.
7. Do sports, or music, or cooking
   Innovating museums is a great job, but you’ve got to get out of it occasionally as well. For me, running is the perfect way to empty my head and make space for new ideas and creative solutions to challenges I’m facing. Also, most of my blogposts I “write” while running.

* There’s no need to read every book from cover to cover. Especially non-fiction can often be scanned, studied, reread, or simply thumbed through rather randomly. Although some people will disagree, in my case it often works better for creativity if I’m more or less halfway through five books at the same time, than completely immersed in one.

How do you keep yourself creative and coming up with great ideas? Please leave your thoughts in the comments.

Regardless of Google’s don’t be evil ethos, they are successfully slaughtering serendipity. For a while now, on most searches I do the only surprising results are ads. Most others in the top-x are recommended or shared or +1d by people in my social circles. The announcement of Search plus Your World hints the web will only be getting smaller as time goes on.

It made me think of a forgotten social network I probably spent more time with than Google+ and Facebook combined: StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon is the cabinet of curiosities of the web. StumbleUpon is the unGoogle, a curated collection of stuff you didn’t even know you were looking for. I stumbled around in the arts section and saw more great stuff than in a week on Twitter.

With a population of 20 million StumbleUpon doesn’t have the body of most other social networks. However, unlike most other social networks, the users of StumbleUpon are open to chance encounters, welcome serendipity, and value quality regardless of its origin.

StumbleUpon is around since 2001, but I think its potential for museums is severely overlooked when we talk about social media. Ranked 126th worldwide on Alexa, the website is directing huge amounts of visitors to great content on the web. Plus, according to Wikipedia they added millions of users in the past year, which strengthens my believe that there’s a growing interest in content from beyond once’s social circles.

(StumbleUpon also functions as a social bookmarking and sharing website, but its true strength I believe stays the “click to get a random great website”.)

Here’s what you can do today with StumbleUpon to be part of the serendipitous web:

• Add the button to your online collection pages. It’s as simple as adding a Facebook Like-button and allows people to stumble upon your objects. Usually its included in the share widgets, but I think StumbleUpon deserves a more prominent place. See the button in action on the blog of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, or on top of this post.
• Create an account and use StumbleUpon’s share function to create an online scrapbook for your museum, and share it with your followers. SocialMedia Examiner has a good guide on how to build a following and share according to StumbleUpon’s etiquette.
• Occasionally, stumble some of the most interesting objects, blogposts, or stories from your museum and use the comments to trigger conversations with people that might have never heard about your institution before. Remember, these people are not from your social circle, so spamming is even less appreciated, but an occasional share won’t hurt.

I’m curious to hear whether other museums have experimented with StumbleUpon recently (say, since they have their new logo) and what your experiences are. I think it might be a perfect match and in my own experience I’ve both enjoyed StumbleUpon as a consumer and as a content producer. Please leave your thoughts in the comments. Thanks!

Last year – best wishes for 2012! – I got my hands on a copy of The Happy Museum: A tale of how it could turn out all right. It’s a happy little publication (PDF) I hadn’t heard of before about the role museums play in our changing world, and should play to remain relevant and add to a more sustainable future. And, hidden between the lines, there’s a twist in the story that takes is from society straight to social media…

In 2010, when asked to imagine museums in 2020, I wrote about how I believe a museum has and should have a responsible position in culture, art and heritage and also in society in general. The Happy Museum takes this further and focuses on the role museums can play to limit consumption, make people happier and generally contribute to the well-being of people.

The Happy Museum has two USPs when it comes to playing an active part in these areas, and I’ve added a third which I believe is equally important:

1. Apart from the gift shop, museum don’t try to sell anything but understanding and enjoyment. Therefore they are a sanctuary from the advertising and commercialisation of the public space.
2. As public (social) spaces, museums offer a counterpart to the ever more privatised public realm, where hardly anything is freely accessible anymore (especially when they are truly “free”, as in “gratis”).
3. In the world of StarBucks and Apple stores, museums provide an opportunity to experience something ‘unique’ in the original meaning of the word: one of a kind (not unique as in: venti triple half-caf organic caramel macchiato).

One of the main ways The Happy Museum proposes to achieve this will sound familiar to readers of this blog with some experience with social media. They propose using the Five Ways to Well-being, namely: Connect, be active, take notice, keep learning and give. Sounds familiar?

Of course this way of thinking about a relationship with the audience doesn’t stem from the social media realm. In fact, it’s more likely to come from the field of well-being in the first place. Having been forgotten and now rediscovered, in the midst of the social media revolution, these words will resonate with many people who would have not as easily been involved in tricky stuff as “human happiness”: the new media people.

And why shouldn’t the rules that help you build a Facebook fanpage or grow your Twitter following apply to all other areas where we’re working with people?

I strongly feel The Happy Museum is an encouragement to all of us who have been involved in social media practices to institutionalise your way of thinking in the larger context of the institution. We all (including your bosses) agree on the USPs (I guess), so why not give it a shot? I believe that a stronger focus on society and well-being will help keep museums relevant in the future, and having a more social media minded organisation will certainly not hurt these efforts.

N.B. I’ve published a little list of ways to get your coworkers engaged which might come in handy.

Quite some blogs are offering “best of” lists at the moment (notably, Expert Enough, Know Your Own Bone and Time’s Best Blogs of 2011), and I find these surprisingly pleasant. Also, even on blogs I follow closely I miss some posts, which then turn out to be the best. That’s my luck; to help yours, here’s the best of the museum of the future of 2011:

1. 6 useful Google Analytics Custom Reports and Advanced Segments for museum websites
2. How the Google Art Project might revolutionize the physical museum experience
3. DOK Delft, inspirational library concepts
4. Integrated media strategies for museums
5. 30 do’s for designing successful participatory and crowdsourcing projects
6. Using Foursquare to make historical contents locally available (and reach new audiences)
7. What is good museum architecture?
8. Bumpy rides and dead-end streets
9. How to measure engagement and participation? An experiment with Google Analytics
10. Videos and blogs about museums, technology and media

It’s great to see the strategic and result-oriented posts get quite some attention this year. Also, without Google I would have been nowhere (in terms of topics and traffic).

Some numbers. You and some 23,760 others came over 36k times to read something, leave a comment or share thoughts with your social networks. In total, people spent over 1000 hours on my blog of which – my estimate – 68% was paid for by somebody’s boss, for which I’m terribly sorry.

I wrote 57 posts in 2011 and thus did not achieve my own target of 80. In exchange, I gave 15 presentations, of which some are available online. Now, let’s get going with 2012.

A persistent misconception is tormenting the cultural sector and it’s a misconception about value. I’ve heard people say the craziest things about value, including from experts put on stage to educate us. One of them, just to pick an example: Social media allows us to have a large impact with a low investment. Bollocks!

Another one: The cultural sector has significant social and cultural value, but not necessarily economic value.

Talking about economical value and social value and their relationship makes the value discussion way too complex, especially since “The Economy” has been branded as something difficult (read Tim Harford to understand it’s not) and value is understood as profit and loss (read Seth Godin to understand it’s not).

To make everything easier, here’re the two things you need to understand about value:

1. Value and money are two completely different things. Value more closely resembles karma. It’s a universal currency and the banking of it is outsourced to everybody.
2. In a way, value is a constant. Over the long run, the value you receive will always equal the value you have created for others. However, this relationship can be diffuse.

If you understand this, you’ll understand there’s no such thing as a big impact for a low investment, in social media or elsewhere. Everybody who tells you so AD 2011 is a fraudster. A tweet that receives hundreds of retweets might be free to send, but to build the engaged following that will retweet it takes at least 6 to 12 months of professional high-quality tweeting. That’s a huge investment for, at best, a large impact. It’s why corporates pay for their videos to go viral.

(It works the other way around though. Give an endless amount of truly great stuff away for free and one day, ‘out of the blue’, you might have a huge impact. Read Chris Anderson’s Free to understand this better.)

This also explains why if you really have a lot of cultural and social value, you also have a lot of economic value (you simply have a lot of value, period). The trick is to convert some of this value into money to pay your bills. Some cultural institutions such as Tate and Foam Amsterdam are really good at this. You can be too; if you really believe you have something valuable to offer.

Value is not a difficult thing to understand, but it’s hard to implement in organisations that never had to worry about their karma. And I’m looking at conference organisers when I say, let us please put some people on stage from other sectors who understand the concept of value, so we can pay or bills also in the next decade. Thank you in advance.

This post will answer the number one question I’ve been asked after it became known the Museum of National History would cease to exist in January: What will I do next year? And to take away some worries immediately, I won’t be gone from the cultural sector. At least not entirely, as I will explain shortly.

Starting right after New Year I will be working on what we call a “strategy start-up”. Together with the talented digital producer, music enthusiast and my good friend Erwin Elling, I will start a company that will help others to use the opportunities of the 21st century strategically and sustainably, and create campaigns and strategies that add value to brands.

We call it a strategy start-up because on the one hand we will use the no-nonsense mindset of start-ups in approaching challenges, while at the same time we will look beyond the short-term objectives that often dominate (digital) projects.

Ever more organisations have taken successful first steps in the digital domain, and can pride themselves in an established traditional presence. Today, however, they’re faced with the question “what’s next?” How to turn Facebook fans into visitors? How to connect with completely new target groups? How to build a meaningful relationship with our audience that spans the physical and digital domain? How to make some money doing so?

That’s where we come in. Together with our future clients we will give workshops, training, co-create successful campaigns and strategy, develop a vision for the coming years and help you make sense of the immense possibilities of the 21st century.

So, next time we meet you’ll be wearing a striped suit?!

Well, probably not. Next time we meet will be like last time, but better, I’d say. Both Erwin and I care strongly about culture, the arts and society and we’d love to continue working with many of the amazing institutions and people we’ve met.

At the same time we’re open to partnerships with for-profits that sell wonderful products or services. We’d love to take the lessons we’ve learned in either sector (for- or non-profit) and apply the best elements in the other, so together with you we can do some really ground-breaking work.

Therefore, this blog will not stop. Maybe in the coming year there will be some more influences from other sectors such as theatre, music and festivals, but I’ll continue to write about participation and innovation in museums as well.

Also, I’d love to work with you. Over the last years I’ve been speaking and giving workshops at numerous events in- and outside of museums, and this will not stop in 2012. I’ll even have more time to do so and do more in-depth projects. Please contact me if you’re interested in having me give a workshop or presentation, or our services as a strategy start-up.

If you contact me, make sure to mention you’re a regular to the blog. Without all the comments and contributions, emails and conversations at conferences, I wouldn’t have been able to pull this off. Allow me to return the favour when we work together in the future.

Thanks, I’m convinced. Where can I find more?

Hmmm… We haven’t yet figured out our name, so there’s no domain name and thus no website, yet. I promise we’ll have this ready in early January and you’ll be among the first to know. If you have the perfect idea for a name for our strategy start-up, drop me a note. I’m sure I can reward your idea with a free workshop if we pick it:-)

Thanks for sticking with me, thanks for reading the blog. There’ll be one or two more posts before the end of the year, and after that: See you in 2012!

This week at the Dish conference in Rotterdam I gave a presentation about all the do’s and don’ts, tips and tricks, lessons and hands-on advice about crowdsourcing from my experience at the Museum of National History. Well… that’s quite a lot to talk about. All in all I came up with some 25-30 little notes, which the audience of my presentation – in a little participatory trick – had to label as do’s or don’ts.

Here’s the full list, now all as do’s, with some additional ideas that didn’t fit in the presentation. Use it to your benefit and please add your thoughts when you feel I’ve missed some.

1. Ask your potential participants a clear question or a clear task. A clear question is never ambiguous, unless you’re looking for (and only looking for) different ways to look at its ambiguity.
2. Run a couple of real-life test sessions with your question. Even if it’s an online project, ask people in the street your question and see how they respond. Change the question all the time. Once people only respond with the answers you’re looking for, you’ve found your question.
3. Ask a question that is meaningful to people. Questions that might be labelled emotional or highly personal are good. Not everybody will answer them, but the answers you’ll get will be so much more valuable.
4. Pinpoint very specific groups of people you’d like to reach with your project. Design to meet their demands and answer to their needs. Preferably, involve this target group in the design of your project.
5. That said: don’t exclude anyone from participating if they really want to.
6. Be extremely clear about your limits to what people can contribute, and keep these as limited as possible. Racism, hate, advertising and unlawful things are usually enough to exclude.
7. Accept all other contributions, regardless of they way in which you perceive their quality. Every time a person took the trouble to contribute to your project, this contribution is valuable (you can use peer reviewing to maintain overall high quality).
8. Do not put limits on the length of a contribution, unless these limits are an explainable part of the project. Also, don’t limit the number of contributions per visitor, but design your system in a way that it gives all contributions equal importance.
9. Quick win: even unwanted contributions can tell you something, so when moderating, don’t delete these, but make them invisible. Some of the best things I discovered about how to design good projects I learned from stuff that happened by accident.
10. Never ever fake contributions, not even the first 10-20 to get the project going. Even though you think you might be a great ghostwriter/actor/impersonator, many will see through it immediately. Use your own name if you want to contribute.
11. That said: there’s nothing wrong with asking your inner circle to be the first to participate. Encourage colleagues to join in and share, tell your friends. All crowdsourcing is incrowdsourcing in a way, so you better have this work to your advantage.
12. Furthermore, don’t use VIPs to get your project underway. Next to the life’s story of Richard Branson or the photography of Anton Corbijn, my contribution will be so small I better not even contribute. In my experience VIPs that are not raised by the community serving the project will have a negative impact on your project.
13. If you want discussion around contributions, specifically ask for discussion or design your system in such a way that new contributions show up near related ones. In my experience, people prefer to present their thoughts as a new contribution, not as a reaction to another contribution.
14. Design a straightforward process to contributing, preferably as simple as possible and integrated in the normal things people do in your institution.
15. Think about the different steps of the process (making contact, getting people interested, engaging them and making them enthusiastic) and make sure all these are well designed and work towards your goal.
16. Furthermore, to your contributors, divide the project in clearly distinguishable phases. For instance, first everybody can tag words, then people can review earlier contributions to select the best and then final description is uploaded to your collections database.
17. Crowdsourcing is not only about participation. It’s just as important to reach people with your project (PR, marketing, etc.), to continuously improve and redesign your project (project management) and to evaluate and report on the project. Focus on these elements as well.
18. Design for different types of participation. Not everybody is a creator (deciphering words, telling stories), some people prefer commenting or rating or collecting. Make sure your project caters to these different needs and gives a place to everybody.
19. Make participation almost invisible, for instance by making it part of the normal stuff people do in your institution or by counting and measuring things they very easily do (like taking guidebooks or making photos).
20. Look for ways to merge participation in the digital and physical world. In my experience the best crowdsourcing projects seamlessly integrate online and offline, focusing on the objective rather than the choice of medium.
21. Create a safe environment for people to contribute. Make it somewhat private, but also special. For instance, in my experience voting and selecting works best when it is kept individually and small, whereas creating (once done) deserves a bit of an audience.
22. Don’t focus on beautiful websites and wonderful installations too much, focus on highly functional design. Some of the best crowdsourcing projects I’ve seen where made on a shoestring budget with stuff that was lying around.
23. Celebrate contributions with contributors. All contributions are special, and everyone who dared to contribute is a hero, so openly celebrate contributions, and:
24. Give credit to the contributors. Unless the idea behind your project is different, make sure you overdo the amount of credit you give contributors. Keep their names next to the photos forever, and use their contributions in future publications of which you send them a free copy (with credit line), invite them to openings and special tours.
25. Because, always, always give feedback on the results and process. Keep people informed about everything. What happened with their contribution? What is going on with the project? And not just after 6 months, but all the time. Keep them in the loop.
26. Have fun and make your crowdsourcing project fun. Share optimistic stories with the people that participate, focus on the small successes, share the unique things that happen, and,
27. Allow for participants to have fun. Even if you’re mostly looking for serious contributions, the contribution that is a bit off but makes you smile is always one of the best ones you will get. (Sometimes this smile is a tear.)
28. If you think the joy of participating and your continuous feedback isn’t enough, only give away relevant prizes. iPads are cool, but hardly ever relevant.
29. Involve the people on the floor in your galleries in the project. Quite often, a human voice explaining the project or making people enthusiastic is the best tool to get people to participate.
30. Continuously evaluate your crowdsourcing project and make sure you have budget to make changes once you’ve started. As a rule of the thumb I use that in participatory projects, only 1/3rd of resources should be spend on the launch version, and 2/3rds should be saved for improvements and iterations.

These 30 things might not all be applicable to your future project, and probably there’re countless examples of projects done differently that were successful anyway. And that’s cool, because, well, as number 31 I should probably add, “You know your audience best, so work with them in designing a project rather than with expensive consultants.” (You can ask a consultant to help you with that.)

What have I missed? Please add your ideas to the comments and I’ll add the best ones to this post.

If you name your exhibition The Future of the Photography Museum you’re sure to spark my curiosity. And if one of the installations makes it to the Huffington Post where it unleashes a storm of negative comments – as happened with the stunning 24 Hours Photos by Erik Kessels – you can be certain there’s something worthwhile going on. And there is! If you’re in Amsterdam before December 7th (for GLAMcamp Amsterdam, DISH 2011 or leisure) it’s a must-see.

The Future of the Photography Museum and its accompanying magazine What’s Next? by Foam in Amsterdam are an investigation into the possibilities and trends of photography as a medium, the photography museum as intermediary, the relationship with the audience and even monetary and organisational aspects of the museum of the future. The exposition is slightly messy, which is not bad as it’s a mash-up of different ideas by four guest curators: Lauren Cornell, Jefferson Hack, Erik Kessels and Alison Nordström.

What stayed with me from the exposition is the position of the visitor and the general audience in the museum. We’ve been talking for at least ten years about the transformation of people from consumers to producers of information, but the role of the museum in this new world is still mostly unclear. Foam does some different suggestions for this, ranging from new forms of ‘passive engagement’ using digital presentation – Jefferson Hack’s Mother Sculpture – to ‘passive participation’ in which the wealth of UGC on the internet is used to create installations – Erik Kessels’ 24 Hours Photos – to active participation in the Activating programme, where visitors can contribute to the museum.

The best part about The Future of the Photography Museum however is not these individual experiments, but the fact that Foam does the experiments in the first place. The exhibition celebrates the tenth anniversary of Foam, but rather than looking back at past highpoints, it looks forward to what might become highpoints of the next decade. By inviting the audience in this thought experiment, I’m sure Foam learns a lot about how to stay relevant and engaging in the future. There the true value of the exhibition lies. And maybe the answer to what the photography museum of the future should look like is not in the experiments themselves, but in the role of the museum as a platform for experiments and reflection on art, society and culture.

This made me think about Volt, a to-be-build museum for media arts and technology in Eindhoven. This weekend I was in the proposed future site of the museum to participate in a Vodafone Firestarters discussion at the STRP festival. We talked, amongst others, about what such a new museum should look like, and how it could be relevant in the 21st century.

The future location of Volt in the Klokgebouw in Eindhoven. Photo: Tup Wanders.

I believe the people behind Volt can learn a lot from the current exposition in Foam. Media art is not necessarily easily accessible to a lot of people, and its meaning is often difficult to figure out. More than one installation at the STRP festival is merely ‘impressive’. And although little is known about the plans for Volt, I think a museum combining a presentation of media art and technology installations, combined with the normal side programme museums host, will not make Volt as relevant as it could be. It would be a missed opportunity.

If however Volt will dare to reflect on media arts and technology, its position in society and culture, and – most importantly – the position of Volt itself within this debate, it might become a very thrilling place to visit. Temporary expositions combined with debate, workshops and festivals might function as a mirror on contemporary topics such as media addiction, loss of privacy and the attention economy, while semi-permanent expositions might continuously reflect on the development of the young field of media arts. But also, the place should be flexible and allow experiments that might have a greater impact than the museum alone. It could be a research centre for new ways of interacting with people in all museums, and a place to pilot and research new technologies for corporate partners.

Certainly, the people of Volt are considering these and better options, but I certainly hope they also find the time to visit The Future of the Photography Museum, just in case. As I hope you will, just in case, and because it’s pretty good.