Humility was expensive

“Ford thought of itself as the sort of foundation whose staff did not dictate what its grantees should do but sought out grantees with ideas and methods of their own: that was the social-justice way. But, ironically, this meant that it required far more staff than it would if it came up with its own ideas and hired people to execute them. Coming up with ideas to be executed was the sort of thing that could be done in a meeting at headquarters; but finding small, local N.G.O.s and community leaders and artists and researchers to fund in dozens of countries around the world required offices in those countries, with program staff and administrative staff and maintenance staff and gardeners and drivers, plus money for travel and hosting meetings and all the rest of it. […] Humility was expensive.”

— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016

The supplicants were far away

“The first thing he noticed when he arrived at Rockefeller was a strange sense of calm. There was a slow deliberateness to the way things moved that he wasn’t used to—there was no sense of urgency. There was no sense of urgency, he gradually realized, because the people at Rockefeller had no one to answer to. On Wall Street, he always had clients breathing down his neck, and at Abyssinian there were always people lining up in the office who needed his help that very minute. But at Rockefeller the people who needed help were far away—distant supplicants who communicated through applications and waited months for an answer. The supplicants had no right to demand anything—they took what they could get and were grateful for it.”

— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016

Decades

“If donors and nonprofits felt that they had to measure their results, might that not lead them to focus on limited sorts of things that could be measured precisely: administering vaccines, for instance, rather than attempting to improve over-all health; or counting missed days of school rather than evaluating student achievement? And what would happen to things that could not properly be measured at all, such as oppression, or justice? What about initiatives whose success could take decades to become evident, such as social movements or the erosion of cultural norms?”

— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016 [An example of the clothes line paradox]

"And how soon would success have to happen?"

“Was it better to be bold and risk failure, or to give money to a project that had a good chance of success? And how soon would success have to happen in order to count—five years? Ten? Was it better to be patient or impatient? On the one hand, social justice wasn’t the sort of thing that happened overnight; on the other hand, there had to be some point at which a program could be declared a failure and cut off, or there would be no accountability at all.”

— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016

"A near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles"

“The urge to change the world is normally thwarted by a near-insurmountable barricade of obstacles: failure of imagination, failure of courage, bad governments, bad planning, incompetence, corruption, fecklessness, the laws of nations, the laws of physics, the weight of history, inertia of all sorts, psychological unsuitability on the part of the would-be changer, the resistance of people who would lose from the change, the resistance of people who would benefit from it, the seduction of activities other than world-changing, lack of practical knowledge, lack of political skill, and lack of money.”

— What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality, New Yorker, January 4, 2016

Big Bone Room

Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh

With a photo

From JR: Can Art Change the World
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2015/oct/10/can-art-change-the-world-the-work-of-street-artist-jr-in-pictures

“Communication does not lose constitutional protection as ‘speech’ simply because it is expressed in the language of computer code.”

— U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley, 2001, via washington post

“[this] would essentially force Apple to say, in code, something with which it fundamentally does not agree.”

— Code as free speech
Washington Post reporter Hayley Tsukayama, on Apple’s position regarding recent Department of Justice requests. (link)

Facebook

“The East India company was the spearhead of the British empire. They controlled the two most important commodities you needed for economic growth. One was labor and the other was actual commodities. In the post internet age attention and connectivity are the two limiting factors to economic growth. By controlling those points what you’re looking at is Facebook is trying to control what will happen in the future.”

— Om Malik re: Facebook’s Internet.org effort, on This Week in Tech #546 (starts at 13:45)

Om continues:

I think people look at it and just say “no, this is just about the Internet.” But if the Facebook logarithm can decide who wins the elections in Egypt or India or wherever that is not a good situation to have. They have never addressed those issues directly. They don’t address the insidious nature of internet.org and its impact on local governments and local populations. So, I understand that they are trying to do good by giving access to people, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. This is all about advertising, making money, and decisions which will be made based on how Facebook makes more money in the future. […] I Draw the parallel between what was the East India company and I think Facebook is trying to do somewhat the same thing.

Something good

“The Texas Tech offense is not just an offense; it’s a mood: optimism. It is designed to maximize the possibility of something good happening rather than to minimize the possibility of something bad happening.”

— Mike Leach, head coach of the Texas Tech football team, as described by Michael Lewis in Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep, New York Times Magazine, December 4, 2005

“The successful innovators I observed spent less time on identifying and developing good ideas and more time testing their hypotheses”

— A Testable Idea is Better Than a Good Idea, Michael Schrage, HBR

"A tangy, lemony, electrical emotional wave"

“I was coming down the stairs at the front of the bus when a sound hit me like a lightning bolt. It was more than a sound, actually. It was a tangy, lemony, electrical emotional wave. Have you ever dealt with skunk spray at very close range? It goes past being a smell — it’s like a wave of high voltage meat that engulfs you so fully that you can’t tell which of your senses you are experiencing. That was the intensity of this sound”

— Guitarist Damian Kulash, on hearing Herbie Hancock’s ‘Rockit’ for the first time at age 7. (link)

Global, open

“This is the difference between twenty-first and twentieth-century economies. Whereas the twentieth century was dominated by monolithic, closed networks, the twenty-first will be driven by global, open ones. There are platform opportunities all around us. The successful leaders are the ones who will discover them.”

— Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works 

All in acceleration...all at once

“…The three largest forces on the planet — globalization, Moore’s law and Mother Nature — are all in acceleration, creating an engine of disruption that is stressing strong countries and middle classes and blowing up weak ones, while superempowering individuals and transforming the nature of work, leadership and government all at once.”

— Thomas Friedman, New York Times, January 13, 2015 (link)

Sculpture on a boat

“And when I heard this, I mean, I was shocked but at the same time enthusiastic because there was something sick and something fabulous in this story, this Western style sculpture carved on a boat by a group of Chinese craftsmen had something that was very much connected with the dynamics of the world today, the way capitalistic societies treat the world…and at the same time this idea of a marble sculpture produced on the boat in the ocean during the trip, had something like a fairy tale.”

—Adrian Paci: The story of a stone. The video is a short piece about Paci’s own video work, ‘The Column’, which itself is a wordless 20 minute story. Beautiful. 

David Bowie

“My policy has been that as soon as a system or process works, it’s out of date…I move on to another area.”

— David Bowie, who died today, from a 1977 interview as quoted in the Washington Post

Ask Me Anything: Reddit AMA January 12

On January 12th I’ll be doing a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) on MuseumPros, a group of over 1,800 museum professionals “dedicated to people who work in GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives & museums).” 

Update: post questions and follow along here.

I’ll be participating alongside my colleagues Ed Rodley and Emily Lytle-Painter. Blaire Moskowitz (aka Redpotato / @blaireMoskowitz) and Scott Chamness (aka Eistean) will moderate and answer questions too.

http://Reddit.com/r/MuseumPros

I think the general idea is that we’ll let questions accumulate and be upvoted through the middle of January 12th (in the North American time zones) then Ed, Emily, Scott, Blaire and I will really start engaging from mid-day onward. (I myself will be in and out of the AMA several times during the afternoon and into the night.)

If you have questions about the AMA or getting started with Reddit, please give us a shout!

Many thanks to Scott and Blaire, both for including me in this awesome event and for leading and sustaining MuseumPros over time. 

See you tomorrow.

Joining the UN Live Museum for Humanity

On January 1st I’ll be leaving the Smithsonian Institution to become part of the founding team for a new institution, the United Nations Live, Museum for Humanity, currently being envisioned for Copenhagen, Denmark. 

In addition to a physical building in Copenhagen, UN Live will include a global network of peer institutions, small and large scale programs, and, of course, a robust global digital presence. A UN resolution to charter the institution is currently under development in consultation with the Member States.

In my day-to-day work I’ll join Executive Director Jan Mattsson, Head of Secretariat Henrik Skovby, Project Director Jesper Lindhardt, Project Manager Emil Rostgaard Schelde, and Project Associates Anders Kjøller-Hansen and Oskar Harmsen. Artist Olafur Eliasson has played a key role in developing the creative concept for the institution, and many other remarkable people are contributing their time and expertise to the project. 

My primary responsibility for the next six months will be to help pull all of this expertise and creativity together, broaden the network of contributors, and refine the overarching scope and vision for the institution.

My working title will be Associate Director / Head of Digital, UN Live Museum. The project team is based in Copenhagen but I’ll stay on the East Coast of the USA for now.

UN Live is in its early phases, but Jan, Henrik, Jesper, Olafur and the rest of the team and community have done a jaw-droppingly spectacular job in bringing this concept from nothing to something tangible, inspiring, and worthy in a very short amount of time. I can only hope to do justice to their vision.