Q & a with Nina Simon - How do you decide which events to do?

- Hi, I'm Beth Schoeppler from the The Loft Literary Center. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about your decision making on events and on your prototyping of interactivity. - Okay, what do you mean by decision making on events? - How you decide what events to do? And, I mean, you talked a little bit about that with the philosophy. - Sure. - But then also how you prototype the various types of interactivity. - Yeah. Okay, great. So as we do for exhibitions, at the bottom of each of these we have this boring line: "Our exhibition philosophy," or our event philosophy. So we have specific program goals for our events, and for us, for events, it's about meeting community needs, building social capital, inviting active participation, da-da-da. So we use these goals as our basis point for making decisions about what kinds of events we're gonna do, and we also use these goals to kind of map out which of our events are doing what. Are we falling down on a certain one of these goals compared to others? If we're deciding between doing a fashion event and a history trivia night, how does the rest of our programming look, how does it match up to goals? So we do use those goals to some extent first, but then we take a kind of festival curator approach to our events, so our staff don't program most of the event. Instead it will be like, "Okay, we're gonna do Radical Craft Night. "Who are the people in our community "who we need to partner with "to make Radical Craft Night happening? "Okay, Pajaro Valley Quilting Association. "You know, the Anarchists Loom Collective. "You know, the people who-- Yarn Bomb. The guys--oh, the blacksmith." You know, and so we are going out and reaching out and finding those people who then plug in as cocreators for those events, and so we serve more in that kind of community organizer facilitator model, making sure it's really clear with those people what the goal is. So if you're, for example, a stone sculptor saying, "You can't just be doing a demo. We have to find a safe way to invite people to actively participate with this." Or, you know, you can't just be doing a performance. We have to find a way to bring people socially into this, but then we're really trusting them to sort of, through that negotiation and discussion, kind of figure out what they're gonna do. We have gotten much more specific over time about talking very explicitly with potential partners about different potential roles for them. So we'll literally say to people, you know, "Great. "You want to be part of poetry and book arts event, here are your options." You can be a contributor to the event, which means you show up and you do your thing, and we'll give you a space for it. Or you can be a collaborator on the event, which means you're gonna bring some other people in and you're gonna be kind of responsible for them. And here's what the opportunities and responsibilities are at these different levels, and people really easily self-select, and I think that one of the challenges we had early was sort of-- and I've seen this in other places, saying, "Oh, we're gonna collaborate with the community," but it's very ephemeral or mysterious what that's gonna mean. And we found the more specifically structured we can talk to people about, "Okay, here are your opportunities. "Where do you fall in? "You know, here's how you can promote the event. Here's what you can do it in," that kind of thing, the more successful those partnerships art. Now, and the other thing we do, we have a ton of interns. We have a staff of eight, but we have a ton of interns, and they-- one of the event planning tools that they use really well, which I am, like, not a very good user of is Pinterest. And so they will, you know, for an upcoming event, all of the different interns who are working on that event will pin things that they think are great for the next GLOW festival. Glow-in-the-dark cotton candy. Great. You know, great idea. Glowing bubbles. You know, so they are actively kind of seeking things out on the Web, and especially for-- some of the people, actually, I'm noticing who are on here are former interns or, like, casual volunteers. This is a great way for people who are just like, "I have a great idea for you for X." Great. They can just put it there. Okay, prototyping. So we have an event every Friday night now at the museum. First and third Fridays are big nights, 500 to 2,000 people. Second and fourth Fridays are more intimate. So when we're testing an interactive element that's gonna be in an upcoming exhibition, we'll always look for where's that first Friday opportunity before that exhibition where we can take out something that we can test with visitors, 'cause we know a ton of visitors are gonna be coming through the door. And for us, the rule with that is, you have to be actually testing something. You have to be, like, "Here is version A, and here is version B." You know, it's dream jars or memory jars, and we are going to make a decision based on this. One of the things I find often is that people put out prototypes just to sort of see if people like it, and there's no sense of, like, "We are going to change what we do in X way based on the information we get here." So I'm always really clear that we have an actual thing that we're testing and that we're gonna change something on based on that.