Cultural Engagement at the Core

Mobile MUSE has always been about the intersection of mobile innovation and culture. While our mission has been to build a vibrant mobile content industry in BC, our funding priorities have always been to do so with a strong focus on ensuring cultural organizations benefit from this economic growth. This means helping create true collaborations between technology providers and cultural organizations. Not an easy task when you are dealing with bleeding edge research!

I’ve been involved with MUSE since its inception, and was asked to become part of the leadership team for two reasons: to ensure the prototype ideas MUSE developed had a strong grounding in the needs of the cultural community, and to use my background and network in the community to successfully plug community organizations into MUSE.   

The inspiration for the cultural engagement program of MUSE has always been to build projects that use cultural and community assets and help them identify new innovation opportunities for their own organizations. This vision is aligned with that of our primary funder, Heritage Canada, and meant that our prototypes would not be purely commercial or advertising driven but must have a social benefit as well.

In MUSE I (2004 and spring 2005) I led MUSE's first cultural engagement program, an outreach and research effort that connected us with over 30 organizations across the Lower Mainland. The goals of this research were to better understand their current approach to technology, their capacity to innovate, their dreams for what technology could provide them, and surface some tangible opportunities relating to potential MUSE collaborations in the future.

We learned some very important lessons on the ways to contribute to the cultural community with our MUSE technology prototype concepts: 

• While there was some interest within certain areas of the cultural sector on experimenting with new technologies to  connect with audiences, interest was spotty at best. We had to frame the potential benefits of collaboration as highly relevant to the needs of the cultural and community sector in order to even get a meeting to explore
• These sectors typically have a lower capacity around technology innovation and marketing than private sector organizations, meaning fewer dedicated staff resources and often less engagement of senior decision makers on taking risks with new technologies
• In order to be sustainable for cultural or community organizations, new technologies must enable them to raise membership or fundraising dollars directly, reach new members or customers, deliver on their mission in new ways, or provide a partnership opportunity for an existing or new sponsor. With few traditional "products" that we could help them sell, business models for non-profit engagement are hard to come by.

For our MUSE I projects in 2004, while each one had a cultural partner, it seemed most were only attracted because we were able to provide a modest amount of project funding, or they allowed us to do prototypes that didn’t have much impact on their day to day operations (which meant we didn't really have much executive engagement or get much help marketing the prototypes to their audiences). As a bleeding edge research initiative, I think we did a decent job with our first cultural partnerships, but if we measure success by long term usage of new tools, by numbers of people engaged, and by success stories told not just by our technology builders but also the cultural groups themselves, we were only moderately successful at best.

With MUSE II we wanted to create prototypes that would have lasting value to the cultural community. So MUSE II was designed with cultural engagement at the core. Read on to find out what that means and what happened.