Archives for 2012

I know I haven’t been “on” as much this fall, during my first semester on the faculty at American University. But I’m off again for a holiday break. I’ll be back to blogging as best I can in January. Until then, may you and yours have a joyous holiday season filled with observable community impact […]

There’s an arts management metaphor buried somewhere within the recent story about Australian authorities and Apple’s mobile map system. In brief, the computer company’s new (and much maligned) iOS mapping program was leading hapless Australian motorists into a dangerous wilderness, instead of to the town they were looking for. The frequent error led Australian authorities […]

On November 16, I moderated a panel discussion in New York on the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company (L3C), and its potential for the arts. The panelists included two of the leading national experts on the business entity (Marc J. Lane and Rick Zwetch), alongside two masters from the theater world (Gregory Moser, Victoria Bailey), and […]

This week, I’m part of an Americans for the Arts blog salon on the question of ‘scaling up,’ essentially about making programs in the arts available to more people in more places through project models that can accommodate such growth. Getting ‘to scale’ is an essential element in the venture capital world, where you invest […]

I’m in New York, prepping for Friday’s symposium at Columbia University on the L3C and the Arts (2:00 – 6:00 pm Eastern Time). The in-person event is filled to capacity, but you can watch it live online, or follow along (and submit questions to the panel) on Twitter (@l3c_arts, thanks to Alli Houseworth). [The event will […]

I’m attending the Future of Music Summit today, hearing panel after panel of experts, artists, and advocates interested in a healthy ecosystem for independent musicians. And it’s striking me how the worlds of ‘indie music’ efforts and nonprofit arts organizations are finding their way into the same world (or at least longing toward it).

Most of us are now used to our electronic devices telling us where we are, where we’re going, and what turns to make along the way. So, it stands to reason that we’d look to those same devices in more and more circumstances. An obvious geographic extension of GPS and ‘turn by turn’ directions is […]

After such a long, arduous, and contentious election season, we can all use a short civic nap today. Make it a power nap, at least for your individual citizen self, but before you nod off make a checklist of what your organizational self needs to do the moment you wake up.

Cartoonist Hugh MacCleod’s post about ‘Social Objects for Beginners‘ is many years old (like an ancient rune in webtime), but I keep going back to it. It’s an issue so central to the cultural manager’s work and leadership that it deserves recurring attention. MacCleod builds on the insights of anth­ro­pol­ogist and social software maven Jyri […]

Two technology innovations have me thinking about ‘being’ somewhere, and the seemingly divergent forces now at work in our digital lives. The first was this post about ‘remotely piloted telepresence robots’ — essentially iPads on wheels running Facetime or Skype or some other videoconferencing system. I’m usually skeptical about prophecies of human-machine hybrids, but this […]