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  • Museums in the Future: A View from Across the Pond

    I was originally going to feature the report “Museums in a Digital Age” from Arups’ Foresight + Research + Innovation thinktank in a Futurist Friday post, but I try to confine the recommendations in that series to short bites of reading or …
  • The Fourth Sector

    The second flight of “Test Pilots” is winging their way through the CFM Digital Badging project. Besides helping the Alliance test the potential of this form of microcredentialing to serve our members, and providing some training on …
  • Monday Musings: Volunteers and Discrimination

    Monday Musings is an occasional series of posts in which I challenge myself to spend 15 minutes or so sharing my thoughts on something I have read in the news, and the story’s potential implications. This article from the Nonprofit …
  • Futurist Friday: Securing the Future

    Followers of CFM may have noticed I’m on a bit of a “creepy” streak–from blogging about how museums may start surveilling their visitors, to noting the emergence of computer viruses that can leap from machine to …
  • The Watchful Museum

    I had the pleasure of contributing to a symposium at the National Museum of American History’s Lemelson Center last Friday. Inventing the Surveillance Society looked at the evolving balance between privacy and security in a world …
  • Resources for the Future

    I share a lot of resources, links and information here on the Blog. There is even more good stuff compiled in the Alliance’s newly rechristened Resource Library (which used to be called “Professional Resources”). The Resource Library is an …
  • Fostering Innovation part 3: focusing on diffusion

     In the introduction to this series I shared my working definition of “innovation,” and in part two I shared observations on Who are the Museum Innovators based on the Alliance’s experience with Innovation Lab for Museums. In that post, I …
  • As Goes Kansas, So Goes the Nation?

    Every time I travel, I come back with new perspectives to bring to bear on my forecasting. Case in point—last week I was speaking at the Kansas Museums Association Meeting, and in the course of prepping for the talk and schmoozing with …
  • Engaging with a “Director of Audience Engagement”

    Earlier this month I blogged about Museum Jobs that Didn’t Exist in 2003, and what they tell us about the evolution of our field. Evidently the essay hit a nerve, as it quickly became one of the most read CFM posts ever, (about 5000 page …
  • How to Staff the Future

    I’ve been spouting off for years about how museums need to change the way they recruit, select and train staff. Why? Because Museums say they want a more diverse workforce, but the major pipeline for future professional staff—museum …

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