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 ("Planning Phase")


In order to move forward into Phase 2, Project Audience has been invited to submit a proposal to the Mellon Foundation for this planning phase.

Since the meeting in Itasca, a highly active transition committee drawn from assembly participants has selected and seated an oversight committee to guide the work of Project Audience going forward. The strategy to build engagement will include asking the community's assistance on audience research, online discussions and forums like those used so effectively in Phase I and the opportunity to offer input on recommendations developed.

The Oversight Committee includes representatives from the following organizations:


Alliance for the Arts;  New York, NY

Arts and Cultural Alliance of Central Florida;  Orlando, FL

ArtsFund; Seattle, WA

Arts Midwest; Minneapolis, MN

LA Stage Alliance; Los Angeles, CA

Theatre Bay Area; San Francisco, CA

Theatre Development Fund; New York, NY