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One thing that came to mind while I was listening was that we might learn the art of answering tough questions. Here in San Francisco I’ve seen more than a few arts administrators (myself included) flail and founder when asked to explain a mistake or a difficult decision, particularly in the first year as an executive director or interim director. Conversely, there are numerous longtime directors I admire for their ability to always speak of their work in a way that is focused enough to seem “real,” but grand enough to be inspiring.

It is hard to see good people get tripped up because of personal style rather than substance. New CEO’s at large corporations have image consultants who help them moderate their vocal inflection, shift negatives to positives, and speak in generalities. New executive directors at nonprofits rarely have access to that kind of resource. But the smaller size of our organizations does not lessen the number of tough questions we receive when we take on a leadership role, or the challenges we face in answering them.

At the end of the interview, Kent was asked if he had to shift his style when he became CEO, and to my surprise he said no, there was no shift in style, but that he had to communicate more carefully. In his words:

“You have to be much more careful about the words you use and how you use them, and when you use them … sometimes the language you use as a CEO whether it’s with a bottler or whether at town hall meetings is something that needs to be in a different context, and that’s something that I learned the hard way.”

This week, however, I am back to writing about art as part of the inaugural Animating Democracy Blog Salon of Americans for the Arts. It’s an impressive cohort and I am learning a lot. A particular favorite is Every Museum Needs A Community Organizer by Damon Rich, an artist who transformed several galleries of the Queens Museum of Art into a place to explore how our society pays for housing, how the system has broken down, and the arguments over fixing it.

Last week I had lunch with a friend who asked me “what type of publicity do you hope for at SOMArts?” and it occurred to me that my answer has changed over the past few years. When I worked for producing and presenting performance organizations a few years ago, it was essential to get featured listings and reviews in prestige publications (such as the biggest local newspaper).

Nowadays it is still important to get listed, but I care much more about the quality of the writing and much less about where it is published. We May Be Hotter Than We Know, Hugo Schwyzer’s thoughtful analysis of the exhibit Man As Object: Reversing the Gaze, was published on a website unfamiliar to me, but as of this morning it had 1,088 shares on Facebook. A listing on Remezcla drove more traffic to our website for Illuminations: Dia de los Muertos than a similar listing on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website.

Something different about publicity now, compared to five years ago, is that you can see the dialogue. In the past if your theater got a review in The New York Times you were sure people were talking about it, but you didn’t know who or where. Now, you can see who is responding and how. For my personal work and practice, that means that paying attention to community-based blogs and publications pays off … in attendance and in mission-friendly dialogue about cultural understanding and appreciation.

Maybe I am stating what’s obvious to everyone else, but my personal experience is that boards and executive directors (and even staff) fall into assumptions about what press “matters” and who is participating online. I’m looking forward to the rest of the Animating Democracy Blog Salon and hope it will illuminate and challenge some of my own assumptions.

News
Has anyone else out there tried news.me yet? I like it for two reasons:

1) I follow lots of people on social media to keep abreast of arts trends, innovation and reports. What they are reading is often of greater interest than their 140-character re-cap.

2) Usually, I wake up at 6:00am to have coffee and read things. If it were the old days, I’d have a newspaper. A lot of the arts reading is scholarly, statistical stuff that doesn’t lend itself to 5-minute consumption on an iphone during a work break.

News.me is a paid service, which will turn some people off. I really don’t care. Most of what I learn from news.me is arts-industry news. It’s continuing education and if you look at it that way 99 cents is a good deal.

I also like everyblock for hyper-local news about the area where I work (western SoMa) and live (Noe/Bernal).

Websites
I discovered the Andy Warhol Foundation Warhol Initiative Convening website las week and love it. Normally, I don’t have strong feelings about other arts websites … in fact, I’ve been looking at political websites lately to get ideas about enrollment and to seek out innovation.

There are lots of  smart, elegant details in the Warhol site, such as: contact info in the upper right; search engine at the top of the page; blog scroll at the bottom of the page; Project Connect; and a nifty map. It’s clearly designed for a convening.

Many arts websites look cool, but few carry it through to attention to detail: navigation, structure, embodiment of one’s mission. I’m married to a designer and that stuff is daily conversation in our household so it was a breath of fresh air to see a great new arts site.

Another feed added to my rss reader is Summer of Smart, a collaboration between Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, the San Francisco Department of Technology, and many others. I’m a sucker for anything remotely smart that connects arts participation with community-building. Bonus points for political engagement. Summer of Smart has all of this and more. For example, this video of our SF mayoral candidates answering the question “What does open government mean to you?”

Platform programming. This framework—a combination of artist honoraria, subsidized rental rates and lots of hands-on technical, production and marketing support —is a highly customizable and scalable model for collaboration that gives communities and artists creative control.

Speaking from an administrative perspective—pros & cons:

Pros:

-Platform programming helps us break out of a static presenting model and share resources.

-It’s more accessible than the old models of presenting and producing.

-Because participation is more accessible, it is inclusive of a wider range of cultural perspectives and allows for innovation.

-Platform programming demands a greater reliance on earned income, and contributes to the diversification of revenue.

Cons:

-Platform programming demands a greater reliance on earned income, and is less likely to inspire relationship-building between audience and organization.

-It requires a high level of DIY. Artists and their collaborators must take on some of the producer roles and responsibilities.

-Funders haven’t decided how to best support it yet.

-Collaborators struggle on how to best measure impact and share credit.

The best argument for platforming I’ve heard to date comes from Tom Stocky, director of product development for Google. If you think in terms of analogies, apps are to the internet what productions and exhibitions are to the arts—creative people make them, users pay for them and they are part of a HUGE network that can be leveraged to achieve a wide range of goals.

I’ve taken the liberty of adapting Tom’s language to fit the arts:

We think of it in terms of an developer/apps artist/audience user cycle. As the apps arts platform improves, then it attracts more artists to it, which leads to more applications activities, which leads to more users and increased use of the internet audience and increased participation in the arts, which in turn attracts more developers artists and increased investment in the web platform arts. And this virtuous cycle, which is ultimately driving usage of the internet participation in the arts is good for Google your organization and good for every other site on the web every other mission-driven arts nonprofit.

—Tom Stocky, Campfire One: Introducing Google Apps Engine

If you are experimenting with this model as an artist, administrator or funder I’d love it if you shared in the comments section.

Happy Saturday everyone!

These days it is de riguer for arts organizations to have some sort of  socially relevant talk accompanying a performance or exhibition. Liz Lerman and the CFA take it up a notch (or five) because they are masters at combining multilevel arts participation and community collaboration with economies of scale, the more deeply you look at this partnership, the more there is to see. The premiere of Ferocious Beauty sparked another idea for collaboration, and last week the Wesleyan Hughes Program in Life Sciences and the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange launched Science Choreography, an online toolkit for the embodied exploration of science through dance.

The evolution of Ferocious Beauty: Genome is inspiring on my levels, the question on my mind this morning is how as arts organizations we can “put our planning where our mouth is.” Alongside our protests of “show me the money!”, attention must be paid to the following:

• What are we doing as arts leaders to show funders and other key stakeholders the vision, scholarship and community benefit to justify cross-sector investment?
• Who in the field is most successful in this, and what can we learn from them?
• How do we convince grass-roots collaborators to invest time now for a project that will take years to develop?
• How do project leaders assess stability in partnerships early on, to ensure that the big-vision, long-term plan succeeds?

No answers today, just food for thought and inspiring examples to start the week off right. Go Wes!

“If you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook.”

In the movie The Social Network, the character Mark Zuckerberg says this to two competitors who had an idea similar to Facebook—very similar, but not as successful. Zuckerberg comes across as a total jerk. A rich, successful jerk who created something that millions of people participate in. That thousands of businesses cooperate with. That continues to succeed in its mission of “making the world more open and connected,” even as the little people continue to learn the price in terms of real dollars and intellectual property rights.

In the tech industry, money is made by convincing investors to fund micro-variations on a basic premise such as a social network (myspace/ning/facebook) or image sharing (mopho/instagram/mlkshk). Leaders accept that ideas will be co-opted and they address this with elaborate techniques involving unmapped buildings and non-disclosure agreements.

Lately I’ve been wondering how this approach to innovation translates to the arts sector, particularly regarding programming and fundraising. Once upon a time someone (I think it was arts impresario Courtney Fink) decided to have a Monster Drawing Rally and there are now at least four by that exact name around the country. There are at least ten printmaking Monothons. Live, radio and ebay auctions are nothing new.

However, as we look at more recent innovations: mixed-reality events, socially networked programming, crowdsourced fundraising, etc.—imitators are easier to spot. What are the ethics, and where’s the rulebook? Where do we draw the line at adopting a similar infrastructure—is it Geography? Sector? Artistic genre? Demographics served?

Many nonprofit organizations would serve their missions best by imitation rather than innovation—perfecting, NOT re-inventing the wheel. We have a moral responsibility to serve our mission in a thoughtful, focused way. How do arts workers and funders approach this conundrum in a sector that is less secretive but … to put it plainly … hella territorial?

This site has been dark for a few weeks, largely because my five-year-old laptop finally died, sparking a major purge of old files and an early birthday present from Dan. I’ll admit it—I’m an information hoarder. An app-hoarder. A function-hoarder. My old computer had way more expensive software and ports and files than I needed, and even though it was a laptop, it was bulky enough that I didn’t take it anywhere except my couch.

My new computer reminds me a little bit of the arts-organization-du-jour in that it is designed to be a “hub” or “platform”.* It has one USB port, and doesn’t even have a disc drive! Instead I share the drive on Dan’s computer when I need to install new software. I save ALL my documents to the cloud (via Dropbox), so that I can access them whenever and wherever I need to. Same goes for passwords, 1Password syncs my 200+ passwords and software license data for work and home via Dropbox so that if I change a password at home, it’s up-to-date on my phone and at work.

Enough narrative. Here are some tips & tricks I’m loving right now:

Caffeine. Keeps screen on full brightness for movies (and powerpoint presentations) but clicking a tiny coffee cup in upper right corner of screen. Fast, simple, easy.

Chax. Combines chat contacts from different accounts, makes instant messaging for work a little more user-friendly.

Instapaper + Pinboard. saves web pages for reading later. Used for everything from furniture to poems to arts management policy articles to great fundraising ideas. I like that Instapaper downloads articles so you can read them on the Muni. p.s. Does anyone else get frustrated that when you use ArtsJournal via google reader it takes 5 minutes and three layers to access an interesting article from your phone? Is there a workaround?

+ Folder. I don’t know why I never did this before, but now I have a + folder in my bookmarks toolbar for all those “read later” “buy later” “add to rss feed” buttons. Very handy.

Keyboard shortcuts. If you don’t use keyboard shortcuts for your favorite apps, you are wasting a lot of time. I wasted a lot of time.

Rdio. Has cool graphics that show me what my actual music listening behavior is. Plays actual songs you want on demand for $9.99/month, allows you to create and share music. Great for me since Dan owns every song I’d ever want and there’s no need for us to have two files stored away for the rare moment we are on a road trip with no wireless access.

I wish there was an Rdio for the arts—a way I could find people in SF who saw a couple of the same plays I did and see what’s on their “top charts” these days. Also, I had no idea I listened to so much Kanye West.

*I love platforms, just sayin’ … it’s a trendy word these days.

view from my old office at The O'Neill - nice!

As many of you tens of readers already know, three weeks ago Dan and I got married. It was a joyous occasion for all the obvious reasons, and also some less obvious ones. I was never one of those girls who dreamed of a big wedding, but the first and only place I imagined having a big wedding was at The O’Neill. The combination of art, barn and beach was undeniably romantic, even when I worked there every day. When Dan and I started looking for a place to get hitched, we found the Headlands Center for the Arts—or, as I like to think of it, “the O’Neill of the West”—big views, big love, and a place where our rental fees will support artist residencies and other community programming.

Getting married, and particularly getting married where we live, feels like turning a corner in all the right ways. When I accepted the job as director of SOMArts, it was a great leap into the unknown. Leading an organization that supported art and artists deeply rooted in community was a dream I had been working toward for ten years. And no place celebrates community-based arts as boldly and beautifully as San Francisco. We could guess at, but couldn’t predict exactly, the challenges and opportunities ahead of us, which have included:

-the highs and lows of leading change in an organization with a rich history and multifaceted identity

-the weight of important decisions surrounding Dan’s career and how to best navigate his move to San Francisco in an uncertain economy

-the shifting balance of learning, mentoring, creating and curating in my own career.

When I drove cross-country, I stopped in Salt Lake City to visit my cousins Sue and Phil, who like me have a history of working in the arts. Phil, who runs several arts venues for Salt Lake County, told me that it would take at least two years for my vision to begin to take any sort of visible shape. It seemed like an unbearably long time to wait, when so much can be done so quickly. But of course the arts veteran was right in this case. One of the most important things for any kind of leader to develop is the very hard-to-define, hard-to-explain sense of when things can bend, and when they will break. It’s like a chef’s palate—critical. Also, learning how to read the signs of who will change and who won’t, and how to live with the sometimes irreconcilable contexts of my personal feelings for an individual, and my professional obligation to serve the mission of SOMArts and the greater good. In some instances, “learning” is a euphemism for saying “mistakes were made.” After two years, what makes me happiest in my work life is to see a growing circle of staff members, board members, volunteers and artists surrounding SOMArts who complement each other in strength and ability, care deeply about the value of community-based art and cultural equity, hold themselves and others accountable, respect differences, and bring creativity and enthusiasm to their daily work.

What makes me happiest in my home life is to celebrate the moments when good fortune smiles upon us, as we did in early September, surrounded by friends, family and love at our wedding. And in the middle of all this activity came the wonderful news that starting in October, Dan will become the new Art Director for SFMoMA.

So now, we turn the corner. We start our lives together as husband and wife, Dan begins a new job, and SOMArts has already started a season that will include the launch of Feast of Words, a literary potluck and collaboration between Irina Zadov and myself (October), the first Commons Curatorial Residency, featuring Julie Michele’s I Live Here: SF (November), the first-ever touring exhibition (December) and too many exciting collaborations to mention.