The 2.0 approach for cultural institutions workshops and Breakout 5.0

From April 22nd to May 13th I have been facilitating with @ilamandarina and @esenabre a series of  four very intense  workshops on 2.0 practices for cultural institutions. The workshops were a proposal from Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture as part of their collaboration agreement with Citilab. They were also one of the results of the Expolab project, an idea of Irene Lapuente (@ilamandarina, who runs the science communication company La Mandarina de Newton and acts as the coordinator of the Expolab project). So, it was all too natural that she was one of the masterminds behind the structure and dynamics of the workshops and that she had a strong facilitating role in all of them. We were assisted also by another of the creative engines of Citilab, Enric Senabre (@esenabre , who is one of the creators and coordinator of Urbanlabs at Citilab). You can follow discussions on twitter if you look for the #cult20 hashtag.

 

 

Copyright Carlos Cazurro

The sessions attracted professionals from many types of institutions: from museums to sports associations, scientific research centers, centers for artistic production, cultural managers and  freelancers from the science communication businesses as well as students and scholars of these processes. All in all 182 people from all Spain with a slight bias towards Barcelona City professionals. There big names (Thyssen, Picasso Museum, CCCB, Macba, etc.) and little known individuals from the  cultural fringe but this created a very interesting mix. If you want to see a summary of the 23 projects created in the workshops, you can do so at the Expolab blog (posts start with an overview of the fourth wokshop and go back in time).

Tomorrow from 10:30 am at Golferics Civic Center in Barcelona in the setting of Breakout 5.0 taking place there, we will host a special working group for those who attended the workshops, the issues that we will tackle are>

   1. Methods for user centric design of participatory initiatives
   2. 2.0 Technological tools and their use in participation
   3. Examples of participatory projects in other institutions
   4. Projects for activation of scientific and technological communication initiatives
   5. Network management / governance of participatory institutions

   6. Project financing: is there life beyond public grants?

   7. Research on participatory processes in cultural institutions.

 

We have highlighted  point 4 just to insist on the view that Expolab shares with CCCB-Lab (as well as many others), that is, to merge what currently is seen as Science on one side and Culture on the other. Following SEED magazine we also think that "science is culture" and from Citilab our interest is to show that technology defines a whole cultural universe too.

Among the workshop participants fortunately there were representatives, as I said, of research centers and professional scientific and technological communication . But they were a minority (perhaps because  CCCB still is seen as an institution associated with  "culture" despite the efforts of Juan Insua's team to promote hybridization and open up to  "third (and fourth, and fifth) cultures"). Therefore, we reinforce the invitation highlighting this point of discussion. We also look for potential new collabrators here.

In a next post I will talk about what we learned during the workshops ;-)