Patrick Lynch over at "A List Apart" has some useful thoughts about balancing design and content in web site construction. And his thoughts on that balance have implications beyond the web site, and throughout how arts and cultural managers do their work. Says he:

In academia, text (and lots of it) is the only way serious people make serious arguments, and very polished presentations are often seen as prima facie evidence that the presenter may be hiding a weak argument with graphic frou-frou.

This is also true in business settings, or with governing boards, where brilliantly visual managers suddenly turn dry and text-heavy when they're preparing the annual budget, annual report, or other bits of essential evidence about the organization. Powerpoint slides become walls of bullet points. Spreadsheets become dense and disconnected. Somehow we forget that the very thing that brings energy and insight to our creative work is equally valuable in our business communications, and our 'serious' conversations about our organization.

Says Lynch again:

The visual aesthetics that frame and define content are much more than simply a "skin" that we can apply or discard without consequence. Users react in fast, profound, and lasting ways to the aesthetics of what they see and use, and research shows that the sophisticated visual content presentation influences user perceptions of usability, trust, and confidence in the web content they view.

It's not an argument for going crazy with clip art and flowery fonts. But bringing at least some of your organization's design sensibilities into your business communications might help keep the conversations and decision-making focused and fresh.

I had a great visit to Austin, Texas, last week to talk with artists, arts managers, creatives, and other community members. Building on their cultural planning of the past years, they are working to forge a ''creative alliance'' to advance the creative life (not just cultural) of the region.

Lots of great people doing extraordinary work. Lots of little mountains to climb to get where they hope to go. More on that later. But in the meanwhile, I've posted the slides and audio from my public presentation on ''Considering the Creative Ecology,'' which worked to interweave some thoughts on complex ecosystems with the conversations I had heard and facilitated in town.

I'm in Austin, Texas, for a two-day conversation on the 'creative ecology' leading to a public presentation/discussion on Wednesday night. So, I'll likely not be posting to the blog this week.

In the meanwhile, take a moment to watch this segment of Doug McLennan's recent interview with Bill Ivey, former NEA chair and recent lead adviser to the Obama White House's transition team for arts, culture, and the humanities. Interesting insights on the transition, the stimulus funding, and the need for a national 'arts czar'.

The theater world in Milwaukee is reeling from the sudden announcement this week from Skylight Opera Theatre that they had dismissed their artistic director, and that the managing director would be taking over artistic leadership. Opinions are flying. Protests are planned (for this morning). Factions are forming. Petitions are posted.

The Playbill story on the subject claims this as the second such restructuring in an American Equity theater, the first being the BoarsHead Theatre in Lansing, MI. Both companies claimed financial hardship as the reason for the change. Both boards determined that eliminating their primary artistic leadership was the best way to continue operations and save the theater.

The implications of that choice, and the process by which it was selected, will be an on-going point of conflict in Milwaukee and in Lansing. On its face, it's a troubling assumption that business leadership should trump artistic leadership in organizations committed to aesthetic mission. But clear already is how badly and opaquely the board of the Skylight managed the decision and its public conversation surrounding it (board president Suzanne Hefty has issued a statement here).

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal's theater critic Damian Jaques has the most balanced and reflective response I've seen so far on the subject, and his primary point captures the nut of the issue:

The foolishness of alienating customers -- audiences -- should be obvious, but the boards and management of arts groups also need to respect their artists. The people who make theater or music or dance are not minimum wage employes who can be downsized in the dark of night. Assuming we want artists in our midst, we must engage them when difficult decisions have to be made, and give them a stake in our cultural future. They may even have some fresh ideas on how to save a buck.... Money may be short, but mutual respect and good judgment costs nothing.

For a great rundown of the responses and reports on the matter, see Leonard Jacobs' great summary and insights at The Clyde Fitch Report.

The rise of digital media and networked communications is bashing apart the traditional boundary between amateur and professional, particularly in the creative fields. As Clay Shirky defines the 'professional' in his fabulous book Here Comes Everybody:

A profession exists to solve a hard problem, one that requires some sort of specialization.... Most professions exist because there is a scarce resource that requires ongoing management: librarians are responsible for organizing books on the shelves, newspaper executives are responsible for deciding what goes on the front page. In these cases, the scarcity of the resource itself creates the need for a professional class -- there are few libraries but many patrons, there are few channels but many viewers.

The problem is that digital media and networked communications eliminate scarcity (although not the need to filter...which just gets shifted downstream). And that elimination or shift directly challenges the role of the professional, leading to significant (and well warranted) wringing of hands among creative professionals.

This blog post on ''The Difference between Amateurs and Professionals'' is a perfect case in point, as it hits all the expected points and entirely misses the point at the same time. The post suggests that the professional photographers are defined by:

• Their full-time focus on the craft, rather than part-time avocation;
• their entrepreneurial spirit, and focus on the business elements of advancing their careers;
• their continuing quest for improvement and excellence;
• their study of other photographers toward the goal above;
• their individual and unique aesthetic style;
• their technical capacity to achieve excellence with fluidity and speed;
• their passion for the art form -- shown in both a compulsion to create without being paid, and the ability to extract a significant fee for their work.

Yet almost every specific differentiation above can equally apply to credentialed ''professionals'' and committed ''amateurs.'' The common conflation of ''professional'' with ''excellent'' is subject to significant questioning now that the tools of the craft are so widely available.

Says Shirky again:

Sometimes, though, the professional outlook can become a disadvantage, preventing the very people who have the most at stake -- the professionals themselves -- from understanding major changes to the structure of their profession.

To my mind, this is one of the core and vexing questions of the on-line world for the arts (and for other industries...but that's not my table): what is the role of the expert and the excellent in a distributed world? How do we preserve space and return value to those who are extraordinary (by whatever measure you pick)?

I don't think that's a professional/amateur question -- although that's the frame we tend to use. In fact, I think the professional/amateur debate in the arts is clouding the deeper conversation.

BusinessWeek offers a useful overview of emerging innovations in corporate structure, the effort to blend for-profit flexibility and responsiveness with nonprofit emphasis on mission over profit. Says author John Tozzi:

Social enterprises...often don't fit neatly into existing ownership structures. Those that register as nonprofits have trouble tapping private capital to expand, while for-profit companies risk compromising their missions because they must put shareholders' returns first. But growing interest in hybrid business models has spurred recent efforts at the state level to create new corporate structures that allow entrepreneurs to integrate nonfinancial goals into for-profit businesses.

One of the emerging hybrids is the Low-Profit Limited Liability Corporation (L3C), which I've described before. But there are many other combinations already available mixing and mashing existing corporate structures -- holding companies for valuable intellectual property generated by nonprofits, wholly-owned for-profit subsidiaries of nonprofits, partnerships, collaborative ventures, corporations with special stock classes to retain mission focus, and the like.

Most of these require lots of lawyers, and a state-by-state analysis of what's possible (as incorporation is a function of each state, not the Federal government).

Arts and culture organizations often live at the edge of for-profit and nonprofit worlds (earning 20 to 80 percent of their income, and gathering the rest through grants and contributions). As the legal issues get resolved, and new forms of organization emerge, smart arts managers should be watching the evolution -- especially those considering starting something new.

A preview of the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts results have just been posted by the National Endowment for the Arts, and the news is a bit sobering. This is the mother ship of longitudinal surveys on arts participation in the United States -- conducted in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau every 10 years or so since 1982. Among the happy findings:

• Attendance at the most popular types of arts events -- such as art museums and craft/visual arts festivals -- saw notable declines. Even those most inclined to attend arts events in past years -- college-educated adults -- are participating less than before.
  
• Between 1982 and 2008, attendance at performing arts such as classical music, jazz, opera, ballet, musical theater, and dramatic plays has seen double-digit rates of decline.
• Fewer adults are creating and performing art. Only the share of adults doing photography has increased.

Much of the decline could be linked to a bad economy (NEA research suggests that annual consumer spending on the performing arts drops 0.8 percent for every 1 percent decline in Gross Domestic Product). But there are also indicators of more systemic shifts.

The real meat and analysis of the SPPA report will arrive in the fall. But this early preview gives us a taste of the difficult news to come.

If you're in or around the Austin, Texas, area, come see me! I'll be presenting a public lecture & discussion on Wednesday, June 24, at 6:30 pm at the Carver Museum & Cultural Center (attendance is free, but registration is required). The public session will cap two days of conversation with members of the Austin Circle of Theaters and the Create Austin crowd, as well as other members of the larger 'creative ecology.'

I'll be connecting these conversations to a larger discussion of creative ecologies, the existing and essential interconnections between nonprofit, for-profit, community, informal, and personal expressive opportunities.

Austin completed a community cultural plan last year, Create Austin, and this discussion is a way to frame and advance their next steps. I'm looking forward to the visit. Hope to see some of you there!

NPR's Planet Money describes a recent Ipsos/Reuters poll that suggests consumer confidence worldwide is nudging upwards after an 18-month decline (see the Ipsos/Reuters release here). The poll surveyed 23,000 people in 23 countries.

Among the interesting statistics were the categories of cutbacks made, on average, by consumers during these tough economic times. As you might expect, entertainment, vacations, and luxury items topped the list for cutbacks, with education, cable television, and mobile phones at the bottom.



While the statistics make sense on their face, Richard Florida notes a bit of a disconnect in the findings:

...if we're going to someday build a new kind of economy based less on durable goods -- the old housing-auto, fordist industrial complex so to speak -- and more around experiences, personal development, new technology-based and creative industries, the massive slashing of entertainment spending does not bode well for the longer-run.

The challenge of managing (or corralling) multiple voices into a consistent organizational voice or brand has always been a challenge for arts organizations, especially when those voices in the organization are expressive individuals. With the growth of on-line media, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like, the challenge has grown more public and more global.

Further, the challenge isn't just to decide what your organization should do, but discover what its many constituents are already doing. These systems tend to bridge the professional/personal divide without a blink -- meaning that many of your staff will already have personal accounts to share their family photos and personal updates. On those accounts, they may also be sharing work-related thoughts, as well.

So, an emerging job for cultural managers is to embrace the many ways their organizations engage the world -- personally and professionally, as individuals and as collectives -- and somehow align those voices in some coherent way.

Beth Kanter offers some specific advice for one particular platform -- how nonprofits can/should manage multiple Twitter accounts. The questions are many, but also increasingly important to ask out loud:

You'll need to decide who is doing the Tweeting for your organization.  Will you set up one flagship account and have one or more staff members tweet from that account?  Or will you have an organizational account but also encourage staff to Tweet as well?

In the early days of the web, arts organization web sites were often constructed by whoever on staff or among the volunteers had the skills to attempt it -- often a lower-level staff member in tech support or administration. Eventually, the leadership realized the on-line voices of the web sites were too important to leave out of the strategic fold.

That same day is coming for the broader range of social media, if it hasn't come already. Time to do a social media inventory, and construct some strategy to realign your on-line voice.