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Tools for the Future
The Near Future
Social Trends, etc.
Refresh and Reflect
Tools for the Future
Tools for the Future
The Near Future
Social Trends, etc.
Refresh and Reflect
Tools for the Future
- Newgeography is a website devoted to "Economic, demographic and political commentary about places"—including demographic projections, rankings of "best cities," and facts, figures and insights about rural, suburban and urban places.
- Global Foresight.org, a community of futurists "working to advance global foresight culture," offers an extended set of links to futures-oriented resources.
- A report on Cultural Tourism and Museums presented at the 2009 International Symposium on Art Museum Education: Innovation in the Art Museum, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, October 17-18. Based on "a study of tourism undertaken by the [Australian] Museum during the early part of 2006 to provide market information about tourist audiences in order to enable the development of marketing strategies aimed specifically at encouraging more tourists to visit the Museum. In particular, we looked at what trends are likely to occur in tourism to Australia over the next 10 years and the profile of tourists who do and do not visit the Australian Museum."
- The Center for Land Use Interpretation is "a research organization involved in exploring, examining, and understanding land and landscape issues." Among its projects is the American Land Museum, "a network of landscape exhibition sites being developed across the United States"—an interesting (if still embryonic) experiment in distributed interpretation through "a museum both situated in and made up of the landscapes of America."
- Nanjing, China, is planning a Drive-In Automobile Museum (that's right, a car museum you can visit without getting out of your own car).
Social Trends, etc.
- According to a blog posting by Dan Pallotta at the Harvard Business Review site, the "'psychic benefits' of nonprofit work are overrated." As he notes, "Most nonprofits are small and starved for capital, preventing employees from fully capitalizing on their personal potential. Nearly every good idea is met with a dearth of resources, a prohibition on taking risk, or a broken donated computer. Whatever psychic benefit that theoretically might have accrued from putting those good ideas into action is outweighed by the grind of shoestring budgets and overstretched systems that is the reality."
- The Fall 2009 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review discusses the "nonprofit starvation cycle," which "starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders' skewed beliefs."
- And the latest communiqué from the Nonprofit Listening Post Project at Johns Hopkins University argues that "the impact of health insurance cost escalation on [the nonprofit] workforce is mammoth and has profound implications for the country’s current health reform debate." According to the Listening Post survey, 73% of museums (and 72% of all nonprofits) have seen a jump in health benefit costs in the past year. (Note: AAM is an active partner in this project and we are always looking for more museums to participate.)
Refresh and Reflect:
- Once upon a midnight dreary—and just in time for Halloween—the Academy of American Poets presents a selection of Halloween poems.