Tuesday, April 28, 2009

IDENTIFYING A MUSEUM’S COMMUNITIES OF OWNERSHIP & INTEREST – Their Cognitive Owners

Identifying cognitive owners is not necessarily anything that needs to be done from outside. Ideally it is something that should be done from the inside and in a participatory way. Generally it isn’t anything that is best done by some outside consultant.

However where there is some change management to be done there might be some benefit in some form of independent facilitation – but not by necessity nor always.

One of the important things to acknowledge is that an individual may well have several layers of ownership and interest. For instance, if we move outside the museum paradigm and say look at a public park an individual might identify with it in multi-layered ways:
They may eat lunch there from time to time
Choose to meet people there
Kick a ball around there and even walk their dog there
Gather there to protest or celebrate something
Practice a musical instrument or exercise there
Photograph plants there or use it as a backdrop … whatever.
Ask this person to separate and rank any of these things and then tell them that one thing has to be more important than another. How could anyone have the same ready answer on two different days?

The ownerships are multi-layered rather than singular and one layer need not, indeed aught not, be ranked over or be subsumed by another. Certainly there will be coexistent confluences and conflicts that need to be navigated along with the rights and obligations that need to be met.

If a museum is a ‘centre of ownerships’ what it mostly needs to do is celebrate the diversity and divergence of interests – the diversity of ownerships. Attempting to blend these ownerships in the hope of finding some common denominator is an unprofitable exercise – homogenising ownerships is more to do with blanding than blending.

So when it comes to collecting and telling stories and in ways that are understandable to an identified CIO, a CIO audit is a useful thing to have in the toolbox. This tool might already be there in some form or other but for some reason it may be covered with layers of bureaucratic dust and rust.
CONTENTS: Click on a heading
CONTEXT
INTRODUCING THE WUNDERKAMMER & KUNSTKAMMER TO THE 21ST C & THE WORLD WIDE WEB
CULTURAL PROPERTY AND LAYERS OF OWNERSHIP
IDENTIFYING A MUSEUM’S COMMUNITIES OF OWNERSHIP & INTEREST – Their Cognitive Owners

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