What if funders viewed experimentation as mandatory, and organizations were held accountable for being actively engaged in exploratory practices?

The sub-heading of this post by Alison Konecki poses an interesting question, one that she attempts to unpack over the course of the article.  She outlines the inherent challenge arts organizations have in embracing “innovation” in an economic landscape where donors want to see measurable outcomes for their limited resources.

Read the entire article HERE.

While not applicable to the arts community or Boston’s theatre scene, this article written by Yawu Miller outlines the challenges that seven Boston-area entrepreneurs of color face in opening and running their businesses.

An interesting read, courtesy of the Bay State Banner.  Read the article HERE.

This past weekend, Howlround hosted a conference of early, mid, and established-career latina/o theatre artists.  The event was hailed as the first large-scale formal gathering of the Latina/o theatre community since 1986.  The convening brought theatre artists of all persuasions to share ideas, entire event was chronicled on the Howlround website.  Boston wasn’t the only city that hosted this convening– there were myriad satellite convening sites in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, and New York.  So it was truly a national event.

According to the program for the weekend, the purpose and outcomes of the event were as follows:

Vision: Our vision is to advance a Latina/o theater movement,
based in the philosophy of a commons.

Purpose: Our purpose is to create a Latina/o Theatre commons
that uplifts and energizes Latina/o theater-makers to connect,
collaborate, and create.

Big Objectives:
• Share and evolve our artistic, organizing, and institutional wisdom.
• Develop our voice and identify strategies to lift the power and
potential of Latina/o theater.
• Update the narrative.
• Optimize relationship building among Latina/o theater-makers to
seed a multitude of collaborations and strengthen our burgeoning
network.

Organizing Plan:
• To connect through conocimiento (building knowledge through
conversation).
• To share history, experience, and visions.
• To reveal current initiatives, organizing frameworks, and evolving
partnerships.
• To grow and strengthen existing and new relationships.
• To identify directions and strategies for action.
• To explore technology as a means to facilitate national conversation
both at the convening, and beyond.
• To articulate goals, make commitments, and create a plan of
action for moving forward together as a Latino/a Theatre
Commons.

Desired Outcomes:
• Personal leadership identity.
• Increased understanding of the philosophy of a commons.
• Increased understanding of the Latina/o theater field.
• Increased personal knowledge.
• Create new and stronger relationships.
• Create clear strategies, commitments, and an action plan.

The chronicle of the articles recapping the event can be found HERE.

A compilation of videos from the panels and sessions can be found HERE.

And finally, a Storify composite of the Twitter conversation (#cafeonda), can be found HERE.

Company 1’s very own Shawn LaCount and Summer Williams have been interviewed by Jacqueline Lawton for TCG’s Diversity and Inclusion series.

Read Shawn’s article A Colorful and Complicated World HERE, and Summer’s interview, Stop Talking at Start Doing HERE.

In Washington, there is a gridlock over Obamacare, the universal healthcare plan that was passed along party lines in 2010.  Threats to shut down the government abound.

In an overview of what might happen to arts organizations should this shutdown occur, Kate Ostrander at Artsblog outlines what implications some of the shutdowns of the past have had on arts organizations.

The whole article, in its entirety, here:

Déjà vu: The Federal Government Standstill’s Implications on the Arts

It seems inevitable.  When U.S. Senators take to the Senate floor and immediately follow their words insisting they don’t support a federal government shutdown with, “but if it were to occur,” it conveys a sense of forecasted inevitability.

When Members of Congress note their shutdown “fatigue” but can’t seem to find any rest, and when a White House memorandum planning for a shutdown states that the “Administration does not want a lapse in appropriations to occur,” you know it is coming.  All the while, a real sadness and profound loss surrounds the work of our federal government that is idled, stalled, and delayed—with real implications, especially the longer it lasts without resolution.

The first “shutdown day” may prove similar to a “snow day” – an inconvenience, a loss of productivity, and maybe a respite.  But as it continues, here is how the social and economic impact through arts and cultural policy might be felt throughout the nation and in our local towns.

• During the federal shutdown in 1995, the vast majority of the staff members at the National Endowment for the Arts were sent home, leaving six staff on duty. This means that grants aren’t processed, programs and events are halted and NEA partners, including the 50 state arts agencies, are cut off from their primary federal cultural agency.
• Head Start, a federal program that promotes the school readiness of children ages birth to 5 from low-income families, is reliant on federal dollars.  Look for these programs to shut their doors on critical work incorporating arts education into early childhood development programs.
• The facilities of the Smithsonian Institution, including museums, and zoos will be closed every day the shutdown is in effect, inhibiting tourism, school trips, creative and innovativelearning opportunities, and ongoing preservation of arts and culture. According to a Congressional Research Service (CRS) study of the last federal shutdown in 1995, closure of national museums and monuments resulted in a loss of 2 million visitors.
• All national parks will close, including the more than 40 Artist-in-Residence programs throughout the National Park Service system.  The world-renowned Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, although also supported through a private foundation, would likely need to shutter its federally-supported operations. In 1995 there were closures of 368 National Park Service sites—a loss of 7 million visitors and local communities near national parks lost an estimated $14.2 million per day in tourism revenues.
• Tourism and its associated economic driver and tax revenue generator will suffer. One measure of the loss to tourism is to expect visa processing delays. In 1995, 20,000-30,000 applications by foreigners for visas to come to this country went unprocessed each day and 200,000 U.S. applications for passports went unprocessed. Cultural centers receiving federal funds such as Wolf Trap and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (the nation’s busiest arts facility) could face partial closure.

This is just a brief outline of the consequences a federal government shutdown will have on the arts:  Another self-created crisis that unfortunately seems inevitable.

Please add your feedback and perspective regarding the impact to the arts and cultural community, should a shutdown occur.

Update: The White House has posted federal agency contingency plans here, including those for cultural agencies such as the NEA.

The Arts Index recently released its annual report which begins to show a full picture of the impact the Great Recession had on the arts.  2011, the nearest year where the financial numbers are available, was the lowest posted.  However, there still seems to be hope, as the drop from 2010 to 2011 was not nearly as precipitous as it had been in the years during and directly after the Great Recession.

The whole study can be downloaded HERE.

And a discussion of the Key Findings, can be viewed on the ArtsIndex website HERE.

We are currently on day two of the United States government shutdown.  Laurie Baskin, TCG’s Director of Research, Policy & Collective Action, has compiled a list of the government agencies that have shut down and the impact these programs have on the arts in America.  The link to the article is HERE.

Or, read the entire article below…

As you know, because the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives were unable to reach a deal on funding federal government operations as the new fiscal year started today, the federal government was forced to shutdown for the first time in 17 years. We hope the stalemate is resolved quickly, and in the meanwhile, this is what we know:

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA): The agency is considered closed, with about half a dozen staff approved to hold down the fort. All other employees will be furloughed and most contractors must stop working while a shutdown continues. In most cases, current grantees can continue to expend funds they have already received but should not expect to receive payments during a shutdown. In the very unlikely event that a specific grantee’s work must be disrupted, grantees will be notified and given specific guidance by the NEA’s Grants Office. For more information, see the plan published by the NEA.

Visas for Foreign Guest Artists: If you are in the process of obtaining a visa for a foreign artist, plan for possible delays during the government shutdown. Obtaining a visa is a three part process, starting with approval of a petition by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), followed by processing of a visa application by the State Department at a U.S. Embassy or Consulate abroad, and completed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, on inspection and admission to the U.S.

• USCIS and Petitions:  On the plus side, because USCIS is a fee-based agency that, for the most part, does not depend on Congressional appropriations, USCIS has resources to continue processing visa petitions. However, given the strain of the government shutdown on overall infrastructure, delays are a real possibility.
• State Department and Visa Processing:  Again, the good news is that consular visa processing, too, is supported by fees, not appropriations. Many consular offices thus will continue conducting interviews and issuing visas, so long as their buildings can remain open. The longer the shutdown persists, the more likely it is that consular services will become unavailable. Visit the web site for a specific consulate to determine whether the location is in operation. One major unknown is the fate of any visa applications that might be delayed by “additional administrative processing,” meaning security-related concerns. A number of other U.S. agencies are involved in the clearance process and their ability to continue visa-related clearance operations is unclear.
• Arrival in the U.S.:  Customs and Border Protection officials are considered “essential” personnel.  Entry to the U.S. for visa holders should not be interrupted.

The Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art and national parks are all closed during a federal government shutdown, which will, of course, have economic impact repercussions as tourism declines.

This is what we know as of today, and we will keep you posted as more information becomes available.

In a recent post, Lyn Garnder of British based The Guardian, writes about funding initiatives in England that attempt to link established theatres with younger theatre artists in hopes of ensuring the survival of the art form.  However, Lyn argues that a better route would be to help fund relationships with audiences instead.  I think that Company One strikes a great balance between these two ideals, but it’s an interesting read nonetheless.  The article can be read in its entirety below, or you can follow THIS LINK.

At this year’s Edinburgh TV festival, Kevin Spacey talked about the need to develop new talent. He’s right, of course – there is no art without artists. Theatre provides a stream of talent for the TV and movie industries. As funding streams dry up, one of the concerns is where the next generation of artists will come from. What’s talked about less often is how to nurture the next generation of audiences. It’s all very well creating a funding culture that supports theatremakers, but it starts to look far less sensible if there is no one to see their work.

 

Back in 2006, I wrote a piece for this blog about play-development schemes and the way their proliferation had created a situation where it had become far easier for a talented writer to have their talent spotted, but increasingly difficult for the work to be staged. The result was masses of plays in development, but very few being produced. To some extent the same thing now goes on in theatre with devised work, and work which is not traditionally script-based.

 

As part of their Arts Council England agreements in the last funding round, many buildings and organisations were charged with finding new ways to collaborate with younger artists and groups from different backgrounds. The result was a lot of shotgun marriages – some that have turned out happily ever after; others that were more troubled unions. The truth is that it’s often pretty easy for theatres to offer development time and scratch performances, where work can be tested on stage; what is often harder is to actually programme the work or help it to tour and find an audience.

 

More forward-thinking organisations who consider not only themselves, but also the entire theatre industry, have recognised this problem. This is why initiatives such as House, which is run out of Farnham Maltingsand aims to connect the ambitions of artists and audiences, are so important.

 

Our funding system is skewed in favour of big over small, and emphasises London over the rest of the country. But it is also skewed because some venues have high subsidies, but very low box-office sales. At those venues, the subsidy per audience member is fantastically high compared to venues that try to support artists and develop an audience for the work. So the same piece of work can play in two different venues, but the subsidy per head is vastly different because of the size of the audience.

 

Of course, I’m all for artist development. But if we want theatre to thrive in the future we need to think about audiences, too. As the director Steve Marmion once so eloquently put it, art without an audience is just wanking.

In this article, Harold Jarche discusses ways in which information within an organization can be shared.  The article can be found on his blog HERE.

There is a lot of knowledge in an organization, some of it easy to codify (capture), and much (most) of it difficult to do so. Understanding how best to commit resources for knowledge-sharing should be in some kind of a decision-making framework that is easy for anyone to understand. This is a first attempt to do that.

[This post is a follow-up from my building institutional memory post].

Brian Gongol made an interesting observation on three categories of institutional memory. Decision memories are probably the most important, and likely the most open to rationalization in hindsight. The good decisions always seem obvious after the fact.

• event memories, which are things like the construction of new facilities or the arrival of new employees

• process memories, which note how things are done in order to save time and ensure their reliable repetition in the future

• decision memories, which explain how the institution chose one path or policy or course of action over another

We can expand these three categories with Ewen La Borgne’s observation on the types of artifacts left by work projects. Outputs are quite explicit, while expertise is mostly implicit knowledge. Networks can be mapped, and are therefore explicit, but interpreting them requires implicit knowledge.

• Information and outputs produced

• Expertise (knowledge and know-how)

• A network of connections

Put all of these together in order of difficulty in codifying memories/artifacts and the following graphic is my working interpretation. Explicit knowledge is easier to codify and more suitable for enterprise-wide initiatives, while implicit knowledge requires personal interpretation and engagement to make sense of it. Note that these six categories only serve as examples and are not a complete spectrum of knowledge representations.

Image: Codifying Knowledge Artifacts

So what types of knowledge management (KM) frameworks could help us support the codification of these knowledge artifacts? One way to look at it would be from a perspective discussed by Patti Anklam a few years back. Patti explained the differences between Big KM, Little KM and Personal KM and this distinction could be useful. Big KM is good for knowledge that can be easily codified, and Little KM can provide a structure for teams & groups to try out new things (in a Probe-Sense-Respond way).PKM puts individuals in control of their sense-making, but the organization can benefit from this by making it easier for workers to share knowledge.

Image: Knowledge Structuring Methods

Finally, there are certain types of tools and and platforms that would be more suitable for sharing of each type of knowledge artifact. I describe only a few in this image, but it gives an idea of how one could structure a full spectrum of knowledge-sharing in order to support institutional memory.

Image: Tools & Platforms to Support Organizational Knowledge-sharing

From here, one can now ask what types of platforms would help to codify and share the knowledge that is important to any organization. For larger organizations, all three types of KM are most likely necessary. Too often, Big KM is seen as sufficient, but in complex work environments, Little KM and Personal KM are also needed and should work in conjunction with Big KM. These are three important pieces, that should remain loosely joined in order for each to do what it does best.

An in-depth look into the Ole Miss University production of The Laramie Project that was disrupted when  members of the schools football team began to heckle the actors by using homophobic slurs.  The article, by Kim Severson and Alan Blinder, can be accessed HERE.

OXFORD, Miss. — Every seat in the house was sold out for Friday’s performance of “The Laramie Project,” a play staged by the University of Mississippi theater department about an anti-gay hate crime.

Hundreds of miles away, the Ole Miss football team was preparing to take on Auburn.

The two groups of students, about as far apart as any cultural groups on a college campus could be, became linked this week after football players and other freshmen disrupted the play with homophobic heckling.

University officials are investigating the episode, employing a new bias incident response team developed earlier this year.

The university, despite enormous changes, still struggles with the legacy of its integration in 1962 that resulted in two deaths and dozens of injuries.Since then, the university has made inclusion and racial healing a theme, but problems persist.

In 2012, a student protest against the re-election of President Obama turned disorderly, with some students chanting racial epithets and two charged with disorderly conduct.

Particularly in light of that episode, the uproar over the play brought out a certain defensiveness on campus among some students, but many applauded what they say was a thorough and swift response from the university. The actors themselves were thrust into a national spotlight. Well-wishers from theater communities in Los Angeles and New York reached out to the school in a show of support.

So did the Matthew Shepard Foundation, founded after Mr. Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, was robbed, beaten and tied to a fence on a rural road in 1998. He was found 18 hours later, barely alive, and died from the attack. The play is based on his death.

“I was disappointed to see that a number of Ole Miss football players and others in the audience decided to interrupt a performance of the play using anti-gay slurs,” said his mother, Judy Shepard. “Using hate-filled words to interrupt a play about anti-gay hate is a sad irony.”

Officials and students at the school, including some who were heckled during the play, were quick to point out that the football players were not the only students disrupting the performance, and said blaming the football program was wrong.

Some said the episode was more about immature theatergoers and the background from which the students came.

“It was a bunch of teenage boys being stupid,” said Ashley Kozich, 20, who had heard what happened but said that not too many people on campus were talking about it. “Probably if it happened at any other school it would not be getting all this attention.”

In an interview on campus on Friday, Daniel W. Jones, the chancellor, called it painful, but also saw it as learning opportunity for the students involved.

“A lot of students come here with less exposure to social issues than they might at other schools,” he said. “Because of our unique history of injustice, we have a larger responsibility and opportunity to deal with intolerance in any form.”

Once an investigation of the heckling on Tuesday is concluded, the school will consider disciplinary action, which could range from a public apology to expulsion, Dr. Jones said.

In a report issued Friday evening, the school’s bias response team recommended that every student who attended the play be ordered to attend an educational session led by faculty and others.

About 125 people were at the Meek Auditorium on Tuesday. Many were students taking a theater appreciation class.

There are conflicting reports about whether a derogatory word for a homosexual man was used, but several people who attended agree that catcalls, giggling, inappropriate coughing and burping began during the first act and escalated in the second act.

The harassment included making fun of the weight of one of the actors and commenting on the body of the stage manager who told the audience after intermission to silence their cellphones.

A student working on the production noticed that football players were among the hecklers and contacted the athletic department. An administrator hurried to the theater.

A member of the team apologized to cast members on Tuesday, said Adam Ganucheau, 21, editor in chief of The Daily Mississippian, which first reported the story on Thursday. He said Friday in an interview that no one had traced a homophobic slur to a football player.

After the story came out, the chancellor and the school’s athletic director both issued statements deploring the episode. Hugh Freeze, the football coach, said on Twitter that “we certainly do not condone any actions that offend or hurt people in any way.”

For the cast members, who gathered in the theater at noon Friday to discuss the episode and listen to encouraging words from administrators and theater faculty, the fact that the play provoked such strong reaction was, in a way, exactly what theater is supposed to do.

“We in 2013 like to think that we’ve come a long way, but this has opened our eyes that we haven’t,” said Garrison Gibbons, 20, an openly gay theater major who was one of the biggest targets of the audience’s behavior. “I’d like to think something good can come out of this,” he said.

Then he left to go prepare for Friday’s performance.