The Museum Sacrifice Measure
How much are you willing to give up to work in a museum? How much didyou give up to work in a museum? I’m not talking about quality of life issues like relocating to a new city, having to explain over and over again, at parties, what a …
Museum Hack: We Love People Who Don’t Like Museums
The peer-to-peer economy is great at uncovering unmet consumer demand and unused aspects of institutional resources. For this reason, I recently tracked down a young entrepreneur who has found, and filled, an empty niche in the ecology of …
You Go First
“We’re right on the edge but we need a little push Dancing on the tightrope wearing it thin Instead of closing our eyes and jumping in” –Jessica Andrews Sometime change is painful. Very painful. Giving up …
Update on Philanthropy
One of the topics we examined in TrendsWatch 2013 was the “Changing Face of Giving.” Though the economy, and giving overall, continues to rebound, there’s wide agreement that we aren’t going to return to the world that existed pre-2008. We …
Keeping Up with the 2014 Trends: What’s Mine is Yours
This is the third summer update on TrendsWatch 2014: you can catch up recent developments in Social Entrepreneurship and Big Data in previous posts. Overall Arc of the Trend Up, rapidly, with notable speed bumps. Image from Center for …
Museums in a Dangerous Time
The Alliance has announced that the theme of our 2015 Annual Meeting will be The Social Value of Museums: Inspiring Change. Believing, as I do that Museums Can Change the World (CFM’s motto), I look forward to the year leading up to the …
Monday Musing: who’s minding the kids?
This week’s Musing is about an article features in Dispatches from the future of Museums last week: “Gates’ $100M Philanthropic Venture inBloom Dies after Parents Say “No Way” (Nonprofit Quarterly). It’s about the demise …
Revisiting the Dangers of “Small Good Things”
This past Monday, in my musing, I mentioned Kanu Hawaii–a nonprofit that recruits people to take actions that support “sustainable island living.” They are so good at what they do I signed up as a member–even though …
Monday Musing: Looking to Hawaii for the Distributed Future
Futurist William Gibson observed “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” In CFM’s report “Tomorrow in theGolden State” we looked to California for glimpses of the unevenly distributed future of demographic …
Towards a Green Future: Environment and Resource Sustainability in Museums
One of my stretch goals at CFM is helping to foster “a futurist in every museum.” To that end, I have been pleased to serve as an advisor to the California Association of Museums Leaders of the Future Program. That program has been the …
