Computer software and servers have long been the (necessary) bane of the nonprofit arts. If you could afford the equipment and software, you couldn’t afford to keep it current. Since not everyone used the network server for their updates, finding the current version of any file was an exercise in ”who had it last.” And […]
Archives for February 2008
When do you serve your mission by closing your doors?
Mark Hager and The Nonprofit Quarterly launch a somber but essential conversation in his article/case study ”The Ultimate Question,” exploring when nonprofits might help their cause most effectively by shutting down and getting out of the way. The article tells the story of Metro Arts and Film, a nonprofit struck with a sudden funding crises […]
Bringing a new eye to facility design
The United Kingdom’s Design Counsel offers a handy primer by Jeff Kindleysides on the emerging challenges of retail space design. If you simply replace the words ”retail” and ”stores” with ”cultural facilities,” you can cut right to the relevance for arts leaders. Like every other built environment serving a social purpose these days, retail is […]
A little vision of collective meaning
Thanks, as ever, to information aesthetics for this link to an on-line visualization of collective thinking. The Human Brain Cloud describes itself as a ”massively multiplayer word association game” that asks its visitors to enter words they immediately associate with provided words, and then maps the clusters of responses in a dynamic and visual way. […]
Sort of like PowerPoint haiku
Through a friend’s copy of Presentation Zen, I stumbled onto the strange beauty of Pecha Kucha, a seemingly arbitrary but undeniably compelling approach to PowerPoint presentations. Suggested and refined by architects Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein (and described here by Presentation Zen author Garr Reynolds), Pecha Kucha emerged as a way to share focused bursts […]
Illiterate or hyperliterate? It depends on how you count
Techno-trends author Steven Johnson offers a critical response to the idea (and the NEA report advancing the idea) that Americans are reading less now than they used to. The NEA study, released last November (available for download here), raised media concern and national discussion about the demise of voluntary reading. Said NEA Chair Dana Gioia […]
Balancing the masses and the elite
Social-networking maven Kevin Kelly posts some fascinating thoughts on the past and future of user-generated content systems (Wikipedia, distributed networks, smart mobs, blogs, and such). At issue is how such systems balance the aggregated, bottom-up insights of non-experts against the editing, filtering, curating, and clarifying energy of top-down, ”elite” content managers. We all know by […]
Allocating that complex asset, the museum collection
The decision by billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad not to donate his vast art collection to the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art is causing quite a ripple in the museum world (CultureGrrl explored the topic last month, as did Tyler Green, following the New York Times January article on the decision). Rather than donate […]
Getting in our own way
Charles Isherwood in the New York Times has mixed feelings about emerging theater works with an emphasis on active audiences, where the viewer plays a significant role in the way the event unfolds. It may be event-worthy and alluring to new audiences, he thinks, but it lacks many of the essential qualities of complex narrative […]
Thanks to Microsoft, I’m a better person…
As I was upgrading my Microsoft Office software to the new version last week, the dialog box shown here popped up on my screen. I know we all define ourselves, in part, by the goods we purchase and the tools we use. But I thought it was particularly thoughtful of Microsoft to upgrade my sense […]