Old-ish Content Warning!
It’s sorta hard to believe that I’ve somehow never posted about #drinkingaboutmuseums here. I chalk that up to me forgetting that I have a blog for months at a time. At any rate, I was inspired by Ed Rodley’s now-not-so-recent post On Drinking About Museums , and thought that it would be a good time to lay out my thinking about the events generally, and the mechanics of our Denver event specifically.
Aaaanyway…
At its basest level, #drinkingaboutmuseums is an opportunity for museum people to get together and talk about their profession, over some sort of beverage. That’s pretty much it. Different cities have done it differently; the Denver group, for example, is always extremely loosely structured, while the Boston group often has formal presentations and agendas before the beering happens.
Kate Tinworth and I started the group in Denver because we were meeting regularly over lunch to talk about museum strategy, and realized that the community would benefit from including more voices in that conversation. And now here we are.
It’s not hard; find a good place to meet, a time, and then announce the meeting over twitter or wherever. Then post your meetup to the Drinking About Museum Community page, so that others will know about it. We’re trying to aggregate activities from all the groups together there, just because. Ed Rodley, in the post referenced above, has some good guidelines on how to manage the group once you’ve gotten started, though every city does it a little differently. Some cities use LinkedIn pages, some use Meetup.com , some use Facebook , and some just use the Community page. One day soon I might set up a common page where we can manage all this activity in one place, but for the moment the distributed model seems to be working.
But what’s so great about it?
Although several of the local groups have their origins in the museum tech/social media sector, I love that, for the most part, all voices are welcomed and encouraged in these meetups. The thing is, conversations around our work tend to be limited by the context in which they’re occurring. At our jobs, we’re usually talking about museums generally, or our museum specifically, within the context of a given initiative or project. At conferences, we’re often constrained by the larger context of the conference itself (at AIC we’re talking about museums in the context of conservation, at MCN we’re talking about museums in the context of technology). #drinkingaboutmuseums gave us (in Denver, at least) the opportunity to talk about museums in no real context at all (or perhaps, the context of no context?), which has opened up the discussion in rather interesting ways.
The meetup also shuffles the personnel deck; in the Denver group, at least, formal institutional heirarchies aren’t really recognized. Museum studies students interact directly with museum directors, curators talk with social media people, technologists talk with evaluators. All of this makes for some really interesting cross-pollination.
As Ed mentions in his post, these kinds of conversations are becoming increasingly commonplace at a general level at conferences like MCN, MW, MuseumNext, etc., but those conversations are by nature abstracted so that you can discuss issues generally. #drinkingaboutmuseums embraces locality, and encourages, by its very nature, conversations about specific issues that specific museums are facing.
I love that now I have an excuse to meet interesting people every time I visit a new city. I just take to the twitters or to Google+, and say “hey, Imma be in your town! Let’s meet and talk about museums!” Boom. Done. And the reverse is true, too; when a Peter Samis, or a Sharna Jackson, or a Dale Konkright is going to be in Denver, we always try to organize a #drinkingaboutmuseums to hang out with them. It means that knowledge is being shared, and that a community is able to take advantage of visiting guest stars.
It has made my heart sing to see these things popping up all over the world. I guess we were all ready to talk; we just needed a flimsy excuse to do so, and a catchy name. Anyone can start one of these groups up; all you need is a place with beer and at least two people who are interested in talking about museums. I’ve been trying to keep up with all the local “chapters” popping up everywhere; here’s a partial list. If you’re aware of another meetup that’s not here, let me know (or better yet, post an upcoming meetup on the Google+ Communities page).
Fully organized groups (groups that have some sort of ongoing presence and have had several meetups):
And there have been sightings of #drinkingaboutmuseums events in these cities, though in many cases these may not be ongoing things: