The QVMAG Parking Myth

Attendances at the QVMAG Royal Park campus are restricted by limited parking opportunities. Well that is the myth. 

Happily the facts are otherwise except for those visitors who wish to park on the doorstep. The disabled are catered for but not the able bodied and overly lazy. 

What is not acknowledged is that the LCC Paterson St West Car Park is in fact the QVMAG Car Park, and marketing keypoint, that is simply wrongly named and poorly sign posted. To boot, the way finding is non existent and all of this together represents a major loss of opportunity and poor management in multiple ways. Oh for a few signs!

PLEASE CLICK ON AN IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Opportunity spotted and passed on 11th 11th 2012

A 22dot journey and approximately the same as from the
bottom carpark at MONA to the front door

Apparently it is difficult enough in Launceston to make the marketing decisions but more so to then muster the means – intellectual, administrative & fiscal – or even to  act with any urgency While people believe that it is hard to park in order to visit QVMAG Royal Park this is evidence of these failures. 

In the private sector bums would be kicked and heads might well roll while this kind of inaction was both in evidence and play.

Musingplaces as B Corporations

Click here for context

TechChange is an exemplar of a USA B Corporation – a legal structure often referred to as "hybrid" because it combines for-profit income structure with an altruistic mission. Its a model that public musingplaces in the world of crowdfunding might well (should?) be considering embracing.

Even though legislation varies across the USA, B corporation status generally requires a company to embed a "materially positive impact on society and the environment" into its activities:

•  Makes the company/institution responsible to shareholders and Community of Ownership and Interest for meeting its performance indicators; and
•  Generating a  fiscal profits/surplus. 

B corp status helps socially responsible corporations/institutions raise money from what can be understood as "impact investors" who want to create social change through their financial investments.

Currently there are slightly over a 1000 B Corporations world-wide. It is a social and economic experiment of great interest to the not-for-profit sector where there are cultural implications.

Musingplaces: 
It is open to museums experiment with B Corporation status, thus enabling them to attract capital from investors to:

• Improve cultural literacy and social engagement;
• Support research unlikely to be taken on by profit driven corporate entities;
• Preserve and celebrate the histories and heritage linked places; 

in addition to winning a modest financial returns to reinvest in projects. Divorced from the very often dysfunctional governances of not-for-profit corporate entities and expectations of donors musingplaces may well be better placed to achieve financial sustainability while delivering social and cultural dividends.

For instance in the USA TechChange is tackling the challenge of scale. Their founder wants the company to have a deeper social impact, and has to figure out "at what pace and with whose money." The questions being asked are should the corporation "bootstrap" itself up, expand their client base and reinvest the surpluses into growing the operation. 

Musingplaces: 

• How might such an institution attract social impact investors? 
• Indeed, what can musingplaces learn from for-profit and hybrid businesses about financing the process of scaling their operations? 
• How can they change the scope of of their aspirations in regard to scale, and change the paradigm of their fiscal structure to match?

As communities demand higher levels of transparency and accountability many public musingplaces will need to re-examine their purpose for being and their strategic planning. Elastic accountability can be expected to be a decreasing option as Communities of Ownership and Interest pay closer attention to their 'investments'. 

Future funding musingplaces in Tasmania

Since writing to the Editor of the Examiner in response to Saul Eslake’s contribution to what is now being referred to in some circles as ‘the cultural funding debacle’, I’ve received quite a bit of feedback. In the end, it comes down to a musingplace funding model that requires a level of accountability that would be quite unfamiliar to many of these institutions to date.

Also, remembering that arguably funding models are being put forward in the apparent absence of any alternative being presented by anyone to either the State Govt. or Federal Govt. – and in the sense of funding timelines, at ‘a minute to midnight’ .
Apparently one of Saul Eslakes proposals was to reinstate/impose(?) death duties for the purpose of cultural funding. He seems to have missed the one thing in the past that worked much better, indeed rather well, and still does in Britain – the lottery. In Australia it was used successfully to fund the building of the Sydney Opera House – arguably the world’s most successful cultural funding imitative.

Britain’s national mission via the lottery is to provide access to 'great art and culture for everyone'. Via the lottery’s proceeds it has been possible to champion, develop and invest in arts and cultural experiences that enrich people's lives within a strategic framework, running from 2010-2020. Britain has won many great cultural outcomes and the cultural nay-sayers who advocate more money for hospitals and schools etc. have been largely sidelined by this ‘crowdfunding model’.

The UK lottery has funded projects ranging from iconic public art projects, great museum projects plus the funding of instruments for brass bands and equipment for village halls. Thus audiences throughout the UK enjoy new and refurbished arts buildings, and a huge range of arts activity much of which feeds into Britain’s cultural tourism and broad scale economic development flowing from it. Interestingly, this is crowdfunding at work!

All this is here to contextualise a proposal that has been floated and is in need of a champion/s if it were to go anywhere. Set against:

• Regional musingplaces being a significant fiscal burden for ratepayers, some of whom are themselves are under fiscal stress, and some/many of whom assert that they receive a minimal or no dividend – social, cultural or fiscal;
• Regional musingplaces potentially being aregion’s most significant asset in regard to cultural tourism  and community cultural development;
• Regional musingplaces being potentially a region’s most significant non-structured, open access, education facility – and a significant employer in the field; and
• Potential funding cuts initiated by the Federal Govt that could negatively impact Council budgets.

there are many reasons to argue for regional musingplaces’ continued funding – rather to continue to invest in such an institution. However, the second two dot points above contain the word “potentially”, often the most damming word in the assessment of anything. Consequently the environment presents cost pressures that seem unlikely to diminish coupled with severe cost pressures on ratepayers that mitigate against proportional increases in rates. As a result, some means of alleviating budgets coupled with methods to improve the value offered by the museum, appears to be indicated.

In summary, the proposition being put, and in its most basic expression, the proposal is:

1. Regional musingplaces’ levies be openly identified on Council rate notices as a tax deductible contribution;
2. That Council resident ratepayers, renter-residents and business tenants directly pay their musingplace levy collected by Council into a cultural trust – say something like a Regional Cultural Trust operating as a Community Cultural Trust – via the Council;
3. That ‘levy payers’, typically in a region, be entitled to be in a draw for a significant annual fiscal benefit/dividend/payout to an individual levy payer – say $100,000;
4. That levy payers be able to sell or gift their chance of being eligible to such a benefit to whomever they determine – family members, charity, organisation, whoever;
5. That levy payers be entitled to musingplace benefits determined by their Trustees from time to time;
6. That Councils themselves and possibly adjoining Councils also, from time to time, pay funds into the trust for ‘projects’ that deliver measurable short term outcomes in accord with LCC’s, or an adjoining Council’s, Strategic Plan;
7. That the Councils advocate in concert with ‘the trust’ that, adjoining Local Govts, the State Govt., Federal Govt., funding agencies, sponsors, corporate research funding bodies and private donors contribute to the trust directly via various means towards the achievement of specific targeted outcomes; 
8. Set against this funding model there would be an imperative to put in place:

• A constitution for the musingplace that reflected its funding and its consequential accountability;
• A governance mechanism that fitted the circumstance; 
• Consequent to that, an institutional management structure that delivered on policy sets determined by the constitution and institutional governance; and
• Perhaps more importantly all this is an exemplar of crowdfunding in action with inbuilt accountability imperatives.

As stated at the outset, this funding model requires a level of accountability that would be somewhat unfamiliar to many such institutions to date. Given that its being put forward in the absence of an alternative, and at a minutes to midnight, it is somewhat concerning.

To do or say nothing now could be regarded as Nero like behaviour and to be accused of fiddling while Rome burns. And yet again it’ll be the ratepayer body and taxpayers who care about their musingplaces that’ll bear the burden through the loss of amenity, the loss of opportunity and/or yet another increase in rates without a commensurate increase in service.

Admittedly the proposal is an audacious proposal but if there were the will to make it work, arguably it could work. In any event it’s worthy of independent assessment.

There needs to be more research here but I can see myself advocating this kind of funding model in concert with the ’4 Step Plan’ advanced before – Click here.

Letter to the Examiner: Musingplace Funding

Rosita Gallasch’s report on Saul Eslake’s address to museum people on Monday is right on the money. He’s no ordinary economic commentator and he does know how to join dots.

When he says that cultural institutions such as museums and art galleries are going to find public funding “tight” it’s true. He’s talking about the tip of that ominous iceberg called ‘fiscal accountability’.

Otherworldly ‘Ivory Towers’ that once held out in splendid isolation to muse upon the world are beginning to crumble. Almost noiselessly, the winds of change are disturbing the dust and tumble weed in troublesome ways for elitist musers. 

Saul Eslake’s “personal” intuitions might well be much more informed than he dare give himself credit for. Musingplaces actually do offer real dividends and are not in competition with “schools, hospitals and the police”. Not by necessity anyway!

Catchwords like ‘interfacing technologies’, ‘social networking’, ‘efficiency and productivity dividends’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘crowdfunding’, ‘citizen curator’ etc. are increasingly coming together to deliver much more for much less in musingplaces.

All this is going on well below the tip of that fiscal iceberg Saul Eslake is reporting on. Nonetheless, he does seem to be suggesting, musingplaces need to get busy joining some dots … and smartish!

Ray Norman

Why are musingplaces changing

Most households will have someone living in it, or someone near to them, who will remember their museum, the one near where they lived, as a kind of chamber of curiosity. Typically a visit to the musingplace meant that 'the visitor' was passively receiving whatever it was the people running the place thought they should know about in order to 'live better in the world' – whatever that really meant. 

While we might nostalgically reminisce, the world has changed, sorry ... it is continually changing, and what once was, mostly, no longer cuts the mustard. 

Children once could be encouraged to spend a wet Sunday in a musingplace and lose the day wetting and slaking their curiosities. But no more and quite clearly so. Why go out on a wet day to muse when with a SMARTphone, ipad, laptop, whatever, in some cosy spot somewhere, the universe can be explored and from there? AND it doesn't even need to be Sunday! AND Wikipedia is free, authoritative and it is never shut when you have homework to do –  and mostly its pretty reliable. Quite a democratic and interesting place really!

CLICK HERE

The 'owners' of 16th C Wunderkammers/Kunstkammers used their musingplaces to demonstrate their authority and power – assert it even. Later Napoleon, the British, and other empire builders put musingplaces together to display their spoils of empire and to allow their subjects to muse upon their great power in deference to it. In a way, public musingplaces, in kind of a way, still employ this technique. 

Also, MONA's, owner, plausibly, uses his musingplace in Tasmania to demonstrate his prowess and draw a line in the sand. Indeed, his stoush with the tax office would seem to bear this out. It's not too long a bow to draw to say that often(?) musingplaces are political tools.

Nonetheless, increasingly 'the public', 'the great unwashed', tax payers et al, are increasingly encroaching and banging upon the door of the 'Ivory Tower' and demanding accommodation inside. No longer can those running musingplaces claim to be 'the authority'. Napoleon was not an authority on much except military matters and clearly he took advice from scholars et al in order to win. The world is full of experts outside musingplaces.

Then again, by all accounts it was unwise to disagree with Napoleon. Possibly it still is unwise to argue with musingplace gatekeepers if you think about political empire builders in musingplaces. But Napoleon met his Waterloo and ended his days in exile on Saint Helena. But he did give us access to The Louvre in not such a round about way.

So, its possible that musingplaces, public musingplaces, are not really changing all that much. Yet the technologies they employ, need to employ, are changing as are the expectations of their audiences who in turn are increasingly expecting more. That's the kind of change Ole Worm did not have to worry too much about.

Even if it was not Karl Marx who said "religion is the opium of the people" musingplaces are sometimes imagined as as secular temples of a kind. However, it seems that their priests are being defrocked and locks on the gates are becoming much easier to pick it seems.

Marketing the muse

Recently the Ecopreneurist – a klnd of greenish musingplace cum ideas marketplace online – was promoting an app and website that invites people to map oases of calm – musingplaces (?). People value  and feel a sense of ownership for musingplaces for vast variety of reasons. 

A person might want to find some information on a particular topic or place, or simply to be entertained. They may want a "third place" , somewhere other than home or their workplace to engage socially, somewhere they can relax and somewhere to socialise with friends – a place to meet and muse ... their Community of Ownership & Interest. 

Sometimes some people may just want a place to be quiet, a refuge from the noise and hustle of the urban environment or anywhere that precludes quiet contemplation. 

Stereopublic's website says, "Welcome to a quieter world. People from many cities across the earth have been adding spaces of solace and retreat for you to find. Use the map to find your own space." The app includes original music compositions, musingplaces tagged by the crowd, some include an image other simply GPS coordinates.

In the end 'the app' is a MARKETINGtool for the musingplace concept in a 21st C kind of way. The question hanging in the air is when will musingplaces proactively adopt this app as a MARKETINGtool? The answer probably is only when it cannot be ignored anymore but by then the musers will have worked out where they are welcome and where they are not.

Musing right along: how many people have their own secret third place in a musingplace somewhere, where do they go to find some peace, some solace, some stimulation, whatever? It is going to be interesting to see how many musingplaces, courtyards,  gardens, country houses or historic sites or other third places show up on this MARKETINGtool dedicated to alerting us to their presence. 

All this will be one more way to measure marketing outcomes in a digital KPI kind of way. Crowdsourcing is the way of the world and only lazy or out of work marketers can ignore this newish social phenomena.

CLICK HERE TO GO TO SOURCE

What Value a Musingplace

The value of museums in a 21st Century context is questioned from various perspectives. From a purely economic rationalist point of view, commentators typically forward propositions that the funding allocated to musingplaces would be better spent more pragmatically. 

Conversely cultural elitists assume some kind of moral cum cultural high ground and talk about “the public good”. The commentary is simplistic but the polarisation it engenders far from simple. If it were there would be some standout vantage point from which to mount a more informed critical discourse but that is not the case. 

Assessing the value musingplaces – museums, art galleries and libraries – add to a community’s wellbeing is complex and multi-dimensional issue. Nonetheless, in current cultural realities musingplaces play somewhat different roles than they did for the greater part of the late 20th C. No longer are their audiences passive receivers of pre-masticated ideas that fit some cultural norm or other – sometimes blanded and blended ideas. 

Rather, new technologies are delivering participatory and engaging ways for musers to acquire new knowledge and develop better understandings of their world. Increasingly, ‘the world’ they are exploring is far off as they venture to places far from home and examine ‘home’ with more intensity.

As organisations, musingplaces have the ability to improve their efficiency and better target expenditure than is currently apparent given their outcomes. Critics advancing such arguments, may suggest that here is an opportunity to “underpin programming with the advances in technology, societal changes and an expectation of achieving efficiencies and value for money". Furthermore“increasingly eliminate the traditional arguments for public musingplaces".

But the critics don’t then go where this argument is seemingly headed. They seem unlikely to recommend a noble retreat from public funding of musingplaces.

That age old observation that when the whole village is starving it’s rather pointless to be hunting down a few mice. The point of the message here is one economic rationalists often cannot see.

Instead, they might well ask why the benefits deliverable via new technologies and increased competition have not translated into increased productivity or reduced the demand on the public purse.

They charge instead that public musingplaces have overlooked these benefits, new found as they are. Rather than embracing them for the benefit of their public all too often musingplaces' masters can be found resting on rather wilted laurels and wondering why the crowd isn't cheering them on. 

Interestingly, the economic rationalists continually choose to discount the values, and the dividends musingplaces offer to their Communities of Ownership & Interest – and can deliver on in fulsome ways. For instance, musingplaces are adjunct 'school rooms' where children have the opportunity to have the kind of haptic educative experience school rooms do not offer – not to mention the opportunity to think independently. 

In a different way dementia patients, Alzheimer sufferers, and their carers are being provided for in musingplaces in the USA – MoMA & The SPARK Project – with considerable dividends being delivered.

In the language of the efficiency dividend an annual reduction in funding for the overall running costs of an operation can be delivered as a consequence new technologies. Or alternatively musingplaces

might well deliver expanded dividends in new ways. Musingplaces might well be put on notice by proposing a benchmarking exercise that would attempt to estimate the size of this captured resource,  how it might be best employed and the dividends it has the potential to deliver. All this may well allow musingplaces to enter into future funding equations that impact on programs, the ways they are delivered and the ways they are measured. The notion that public musingplaces might continually, and automatically, becomes more productive is as yet a groundless assumption.

There may well be room for cutting public sector inputs in concert with the potential rate of increase in productivity without changing the level of output. Yet the urge to cut corners and apply a theory without testing it is something to be mindful of.

Nevertheless, it seems that musingplaces will need to undergo fundamental change and transform themselves from their 'cost centre' models into not-for-profit enterprises if they wish to fulfil their promise. Possibly even in some instances they will need to operate as quasi for-profit enterprises in line with the cultural and social paradigm shifts currently in play. 

The changes, and the increased audience reach, that new technologies offer might well allow the derived efficiency gains to benefit musingplace programs allowing them to deliver: •

1. Enhanced cultural dividends and new cultural opportunities for an expanded Community of Ownership and Interest; 
2. Value-adding in regard to employment, educational and professional development opportunities for the benefit of a diverse range of people internally and beyond the institution. 
3. Improved income opportunities for related enterprises such as tourism related enterprises –accommodation, restaurants, guided tours etc.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS STORY