Nina's+Reflections

==**Nina’s Reflections and Recommendations** ==

As I stated in the notes, I was really impressed by this group’s cohesiveness, creativity, and dedication to the task at hand. I do think that this is an extremely complex, potentially unwieldy project, and my biggest worry is that you won’t be able to create a clear structure to allow you to make decisions and move through the schedule confidently.

It's important to bring in marketing and merchandising early in this process. Many of the most delightful, zany ideas have huge marketing appeal--and they're also sufficiently weird by traditional standards to require lots of buy-in. You'll also need to work with the marketing, PR, and management teams around a more flexible approach to brand control. Participants and enthusiasts are going to be your best marketers for the Morgan... if you let them. I heard a few things over the week that made me concerned that you need to open this dialogue explicitly, and soon. The online co-creation community project is a great "live example" to work through some of these issues around.

When it comes to engaging with communities, I recommend you temper your enthusiasm with realism about what will have the most impact and what you can honestly handle. When you develop your "sub-matrix" for the experience, I hope you will include "degree of community participation" as one of the boxes. I recommend that you be conservative with this. As a rough recommendation, I'd suggest that at least 70% of the projects you plan as part of the Morgan voyage should be non-participatory (i.e. developed as standard "we make it, you experience it" events and activities). Of that remaining 30%, I'd designate at least half as contributory or hosted, since those models take less effort on your end and can accommodate the largest number of participants.

Why so little room for collaborative or co-creative projects? I was a bit surprised that people jumped so quickly to collaborative and co-creative models for many of the ideas presented. While I think the choices in this regard mostly made sense and I’m very supportive of you pursuing them, I can’t state enough how much more time a co-creative process takes than a contributory or even a collaborative one. Every partner wants a different level of touch and a different type of interaction, and in a co-creative project, you have to move at their schedule, not just yours. Just as it’s important to hone in on project ideas, it’s essential to hone in on core partners, especially for any co-creative components of the process. You also have to be OK saying no to other people—finding more manageable ways to slot their enthusiasm into projects and participation that is easier for you to control.I strongly recommend talking to staff members at Wing Luke and the Oakland Museum to learn more about how co-creative processes look "on the ground." Oakland is an especially good example because their Days of the Dead program, like the Morgan voyage, is a time-limited, event and exhibit-based community project. They also used that project as an example to help transform the institution overall.

Which brings me to my last comment. If I were you, I’d build into the idea-filtering a basic question: what is the top thing we want to learn through this project to change how we approach all our projects here at Mystic Seaport? It's clear that everyone wants this project to serve as a pilot and a model for a more participatory institution overall. I don't think it's obvious or automatic that that effect will happen - you have to consciously plan it in.

Best of luck to you in this process. Feel free to contact me anytime!