New round of free workshops

I’m putting together another round of free, peer-to-peer strategy workshops for people working in GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and public-facing community & civil-society organizations.

If you’re interested in connecting with a diverse group of practitioners to talk through what-the-heck-is-happening in the world now, and what actions could be taken personally, professionally, or across our sectors or societies to make things better, please give me a shout.

(Here’s a little background on the initial round of workshops in April. Since then we’ve worked with 80-90 people from 20+ countries in 8 different groups.)

The terrain has changed a lot since April, when COVID-19 was looming over everything, and the so-called problem space that everyone is wrestling with seems to have increased a thousand fold.

Sign-up or ask me a question using the form below.

UPDATE: We’re full, with enough people signing-up to run three groups. If you’d like to be put on a waiting list please fill out the form below. Thanks! /Mike, September 8, 2020.

Blog posts and Medium article on the Europeana sense-making workshops

Here are a couple of blog posts and a Medium article I wrote about the “sense-making” workshops I designed and ran with Jasper Visser for Europeana.

Cross-post re: the Aspen/Covid project

Cross-posted from my main blog (original post).

My collaborator Dana Mitroff Silvers and I have received a grant from the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Omidyar Network, to help museums, libraries, and performing arts organizations work more directly with their communities during this awful, challenging moment in America.

The Aspen Tech Policy Hub announcement and press release is here.

10 cultural organizations, together serving over 4 million people across the United States, have joined us.

Our partners are,

The idea of this project is very humble and straightforward: Dana and I will bring the group together and provide workshops, facilitation, coaching, know-how, and outside perspectives; and the participants will bring their vast professional expertise, imagination, and intimate knowledge of their communities, missions, and values. We’ll meet weekly over the course of 10 weeks and together we’ll try to nudge new experiments and ideas into the light of day.

When we conceived this project back in April we were focused exclusively on addressing the harm being caused to communities and individuals by the social isolation of Covid-19, but April seems like it was 100 years ago. Now, with our hearts aching from the eruption of pain, fear, and anger of what we have all lived through and witnessed over the last few days here in the US, and with many of our collaborators dealing with the immediate consequences and long-term root causes of violence and injustice on their own doorsteps, we will inevitably be drawn together towards a larger and more consequential response.

I hope you will follow this project here, with the participants directly, on my Twitter and Dana’s Twitter — and I also hope that everyone, everywhere, will become more deeply committed to the social and cultural life, social justice, and wellbeing of their own communities.

P.S.

In addition to this Aspen project I’m also beginning to lead a series of sense-making workshops with Europeana Network members this week, with Jasper Visser, to help understand and support the digital transformation they are currently experiencing across the European cultural sector.

Also, we have launched a call for participation for What Matters Now, an online community event to be held on July 10, 2020 [was previously July 3]. Please check it out and join us!

Looking for GLAM orgs for a grant project on social distancing

UPDATE: This project is now funded! We’re looking for a couple of public libraries and performing arts organizations to round out the group. —Mike, 1 May 2020

A grant proposal I’ve developed with Dana Mitroff Silvers is a finalist to receive a small amount of funding to catalyze the creation of new GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) projects that mitigate the effects of social distancing caused by the Covid-19 crisis.

We’d like to gather a diverse set of 6-12 American GLAMs to participate in the project. Basically, if we get this grant, we would be paying you to get expert design thinking, strategy, and creative-development support.

So if you or someone you know is part of an adventurous, forward-looking American GLAM that is wanting to put some new Covid-related experiments out into the world, but could use some help, please give me a shout at https://usingata.com/contact ! (More info is here.)

Post Covid-19 strategy and response for culture, sign-up here

Last week I put up a post offering free strategy workshops to help people, organizations, and teams in the “cultural” & civil-society sectors deal with the Covid-19 crisis.

Based on the response, here’s some stuff you can sign up for, using the form at the bottom.

(Note: I’m hosting this on my own site for now, because that’s fast and easy for me, but we’ll find a more neutral place to host and collaborate as more organizers get involved.)

Strategy workshop

A lot of people said they wanted a workshop, so I’m working with 9 different teams now in the USA and Europe. I’m swamped, but let me know if you’d like to talk.

Peer-to-peer roundtable discussions

A lot of people said they wanted to be part of a peer-to-peer discussion. In response, Jasper Visser and I are organizing and hosting a leadership roundtable next week (hi Jasper, I didn’t take the time to check this text with you. I hope that’s ok) — and I’d like to help organize similar facilitated sessions for anyone in the cultural sector (with “culture” interpreted as broadly and generously as possible). This will need both participants (hah!) and facilitators.

Ignite talks (or some such thing)

And I got the sense, as I often do, that there’s a lot of great thinking and doing happening that’s hard for us to see or appreciate, given how chaotic things are. So I’d like to facilitate/host a virtual Ignite talk event (or some similar short talks format) to beckon forth people who what to share what they’re working on or going through. This will need both volunteers to help host and organize, and, of course, brave, big-hearted people who want to share what’s on their minds.

* * * * * * * * *

If any of these options/things interests you, please let me know via the form below.

Final thought: the priorities here are,

  • First, stay safe and take care of our families loved ones, and communities

  • Support each other

  • Figure out how to serve now, at a moment of great civic need

Sign up form

The sign-up period has closed but I’m keeping the form below for reference. Thanks! - Mike

This will send me an email and I’ll enter it in a spreadsheet. If you don’t like that we can find another way to talk. I won’t share your info with anyone unless you give me permission to do so.

Questions with a “*” at the end are required.

Free strategy workshops March 23 – April 3 (crosspost)

This is a crosspost from my main site.

Over the last few days I’ve spent a lot of time thinking, and talking with organizers, leaders and practitioners in the cultural community, about how GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) and community/civil-society organizations are coping with the Covid-19 crisis.

Most of us are in shock or reactive mode — closing down public spaces and caring for loved ones and neighbors.

But once the initial shock wears off (which hopefully, it will) and we’ve done what we can do easily in the realm of public service (for example, move programs to the web and promote online resources), we’re going to need to take a serious look at the role our organizations really play in society, and what we need to do differently in the short (next few weeks), medium (3-4 months), and long-term future (years) to make sure we’re doing justice to our missions and our communities.

With that in mind I’m offering some free strategy workshops for GLAMs and other public-facing community/civil-society organizations in the coming weeks.

Not that I have answers to teach you — far from it! I’m doing this because, as a trained facilitator with 25+ years experience in the digital cultural sector and a lot of international experience at a variety of scales, I think I can help teams and organizations find their own best strategies and solutions for this unsettling and difficult moment in time.

That’s what I’m trained to do. And I’m doing this because I can, and because I want to help, and because I believe in the value of what we do in the cultural sector and in civil society.

So here’s the plan

  1. What I imagine is that you are a team within an organization like a museum, a library, a civil-society org. that faces the public. You could be the online or communications team, a leadership group, the board of directors, whatever. Or you’re an ad-hoc team from a movement like Fridays for Future. The important thing for me is that you have a civic mission, you face the public, and you want to create value in society, as they say.

  2. You are hungry to dive deep, over the course of a day or two, into your mission, purpose, and identity — and to model through what those things mean now, in the world of Covid-19.

  3. You’re curious to experiment with the LEGO Serious Play process — a facilitated thinking, communication, and problem-solving technique for groups — in a remote (online, distributed) teleconference setting. (The LEGO Serious Play process is optimized for face-to-face interaction, so moving it to a videoconference format is unorthodox and experimental.)

  4. You want to start soon (as early as the week of March 23, 2020).

If that sounds interesting to you, or if you have any questions or suggestions, please get in touch with me through this form at the bottom of my “consulting” page. Tell me a little about who you are and what you’d like to do and I’ll get back to you ASAP.

Thanks!

P.S. If you want to leave a comment or question on this post, or make a suggestion, please ping me on twitter (@mpedson) or use this comment form here. I’ll review your comments/questions and respond, or post them here, as appropriate. :)

P.P.S English is my best language (though god knows I still struggle with it), but if you need to work in another language we’ll figure something out.