Background

Who We Are

Project Audience is a new initiative to develop a community of practice among community level organizations, whose mission is to "build lasting connections through arts and culture."

By "community of practice," we mean a community of institutions committed to collaborating together to deliver technologies that support the project's mission. As members, we are committed, as needed, to designing together, building together, governing together, and potentially using together the technology and related products and services that we see as necessary to achieving our mission. In other words, we are not a think-tank or a skunkworks: we are a set of institutions accepting joint responsibility for delivering and sustaining shared, commercial-quality (or better) technology solutions to our shared problems and opportunities with regard to building lasting connections through arts and culture.

Project Audience is a community effort that is owned, operated, and governed by and for the national and international community of organizations that it serves.  We anticipate that the majority of participating organizations in Project Audience will be non-profit, whether private or governmental; however, as we continue forward we will remain open to welcoming the membership of for-profit entities demonstrating clear and sustained alignment of services with our mission; for instance, a newspaper providing technology that builds connections between people and the arts for its community.  By "community level" we mean organizations supporting the creation of lasting connections to the arts and culture by serving a larger community of some kind-whether that community is a local, state, regional, national or international community defined by geography or politics (e.g., a government agency or ministry), or a genre-based community of arts organizations, or some other community-serving organization with meaningful interests in our project's mission (e.g., a convention and visitor's bureau).

For an organization to become a full member of this community, it must be prepared to install and operate the community-focused technology solutions that Project Audience will build. Other types of organizations, especially individual producing or presenting arts organizations and for-profit and non-profit vendors to the arts and cultural markets, will also be welcomed by our community as collaborative partners going forward. We anticipate ongoing, formal roles in our community for at least some of these types of organizations, as representatives of their own communities. Those details have not yet been finalized, so we welcome thoughts from potentially interested collaborators on how such relationships might best be managed.

Phase 1 "Community Gathering & Exploration"

On-line events calendars and community arts portals, like those created and run by numerous arts councils, service organizations and other local partnerships, are widely utilized as a collaborative strategy for raising the visibility of a community's arts & cultural community's offerings and increasing participation.

The Mellon Foundation funded "planning process" whose aim was to envision the next generation of technology and practices for such collaborative, community-level audience development work.

Jointly led by ArtsFund (Seattle), which manages TakePartInArt.org and Alliance for Audience (Phoenix), which manages ShowUp.com, the first step of this process was to involve a wide range of experienced leaders encompassing communities (and collaborations) large and small, urban and rural, organized and ad-hoc, and serving a wide variety of genres and disciplines whose organizations similarly support portals, events calendars and other community-spanning audience development projects.

This process was led by a consulting team consisting of Roger Tomlinson (ACT Consultant Services), Alan Brown (Wolf/Brown) and Steven Roth (The Pricing Institute).

This process culminated with an "Assembly" held in Itasca, IL October 4-6, 2009 at which attendees:

1. Approved by consensus a mission of "developing a community of practice to build lasting connections through arts and culture,"
2. Agreed to undertake together a national and international effort to collaborate together on the development of technologies that support the building of lasting connections through arts and culture.
3. Identified two major clusters of thinking among ourselves in terms of "building lasting connections"-a transactional focus on the needs of arts organizations wanting to connect to audiences, and a relational focus on the needs of people wanting stronger, deeper, richer connections to the arts and culture-and concluded that, to be effective, the project must strongly support both,
4. Committed to a set of core values for the project including: diversity of membership and service, inclusivity in direction-setting and governance, transparency in our decision processes, and openness in the services and technologies that we provide,
5. Decided, at the joint invitation of Mellon's Performing Arts and Research in Information Technology programs, to submit a proposal to Mellon for the purposes of conducting a design workshop, with the expectation of a potentially fundable build proposal to follow from the outcomes of the design workshop, and
6. Appointed a steering committee to assist with the transition from Phase 1 ("Gathering") to Phase 2 ("Design") and Phase 3 ("Build").

Project Audience is now in the process of transitioning into Phase 2, the development and execution of a "community design process" that will create a blueprint for the first generation of the Project Audience technology infrastructure.

Phase 2 ("Community Design Phase")

In order to move forward into Phase 2, Project Audience has been invited to submit a proposal to the Mellon Foundation to conduct a "community design process." This is a methodology, developed over the past 10 years by grantees of Mellon's Research in Information Technology program, which convenes diverse representatives of a community into a professionally facilitated process during which they will produce together a blueprint for technology addressing their shared needs. That blueprint is typically expansive, stretching far beyond what can or will be delivered in the first phase of a build project, but it forms the foundation and guiding vision for later build projects.

The community design methodology requires participation from a set of institutions representative of the full diversity of the community that the resulting technology is intended to serve. The participants will include two types of individuals: some representative technologists ("technology stakeholders"); but a preponderance of those having direct responsibility for the problems that the technology is intended to address ("functional stakeholders"). For Project Audience, functional stakeholders will include marketing and development staffs, but may also include other members of each organization responsible for guiding its vision for how to build lasting relationships through arts and culture. To that end, Project Audience will seek nominations (including self-nominations) from a very wide variety of community-level organizations for participation in the design process. The application process has not yet been finalized: a timetable for availability is provided later in this document.

The community design process offers several pathways to participation. It involves a series of workshops: for Project Audience, there will most likely be two workshops, each 2-3 days in length, separated by 4-6 weeks. Before and after these workshops, participants are required to devote some additional time to collaborating on the development of the software blueprint: such collaborations typically require some meaningful time-commitments, pre and post, from all participants. Participating institutions will have their travel and lodging expenses for the workshops reimbursed, but are expected to cover their participants' time-costs as an indication of seriousness of purpose.

In addition, some institutions will self-select as leaders of the design project. Those institutions will participate in submitting the proposal to Mellon and will receive Mellon funding for some of the time required for their participation in the design workshop. The individuals they allocate to the project will receive special training in facilitating the workshops and in the technological approaches to be employed. These individuals (the "project team") will devote substantially greater effort, pre and post, to the work of producing the blueprint, and will be jointly responsible for the final report to Mellon; hence, the partial funding of their time during the process.

This self-selected leadership group is being called the Project Audience Oversight Committee.