NETWORKING AND MUSING

Like any group of ‘professionals’ the staff of public musingplaces are predisposed to forming networking alliances within their field of interest – locally, national and internationally. These alliances are largely for the purpose of protecting and advancing their fields of activity’s standing and credibility. Its within these networks the contexts for KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are established along with the backgrounding for QA (Quality Assurance).

Typically individuals and institutions are members of a peak body and sometimes several ancillary groups.

Likewise, institutions will typically establish ‘Memorandums Of Understanding’ with like institutions towards sharing information, collections, staff and setting up collaborative projects. At the end of the 20^th C arguably this would have been common practice in one way or another in musingplaces in most of their manifestations. In public administration this kind of cooperation has become standard practice for those institutions seeking to achieve outcome consistent with world’s best practice and especially so in academe.

Markedly when it comes to what might be imagined as ‘close to home’ networking slips down the priority order. It is easy to see how this might come about but in regard to an institution’s local Community of Ownership & Interest (COI) it is likely that there is an assumption they have been covered. But, is it automatically so? Often it is not. The reason given being something along the lines that ‘the operation’ has limited resources and is thus unable to maintain proactive relationships with constituents etc. Albeit that such arguments discount the marketing imperative in building strong relationships musingplaces' COIs.

The advent of the ‘Block Buster’ has enabled larger musingplaces to form networking alliances with like institutions almost anywhere and program ‘tourist eye candy’ to boost their visitor numbers. However musingplaces, generally, can only mount these exhibitions with heavy subsidies – corporate and government. In the long term these events may not be sustainable in their current form and their future may well be linked to testing the possibilities of new technologies and the opportunities they present. If so, musingplaces research role, and indeed their research imperative, might just return to front of mind.

The case for networking major collections and their ‘keepers’ is a no-brainer and its well put from multiple perspectives in the world musingplaces inhabit.

Conversely local cum private networks of collectors and collections arguably represent unexplored territory, and generally, they represent an untapped resource for musingplaces. Often these collections and collectors are held up for ridicule as being mediocre, amateurish and dilettantes  zones.  Nonetheless, collectively the collections and their keepers clearly represent a significant research resource. Often they are the collections where the obscure and esoteric are found and these 'objects' and their stories often set up opportunities for serendipitous discoveries. These collections and their keepers are potentially as rich a resource  as those that might claim to hold the 'official truths' in their storerooms.

Interestingly, the digital clearing house for this somewhat subterranean network of collections, eBAY, gives us opportunities for glimpses of what is languishing half hidden  there. Up to recently, the kind of 'crowdsourcing' eBAY, Wikipedia and projects like Arcbazar  – the first and largest global marketplace for crowdsourcing architecture – have been regarded as being components of a kind fringe digital cultural phenomena. Notwithstanding, digitally facilitated crowdsourcing is becoming a part of the cultural fabric of the 21st C.

Prior to the rise of digital technologies, and their resulting networks, reaching deep within a community’s cultural networks had serious limitations by comparison to current understandings. However, collectors did establish extensive networks of likeminded people through associations and ‘exchanges’ of various kinds.  Sometimes these networks had/have links with larger public collections, academics and collection keepers. In the era of the Internet these networks are establishing more dynamic interfaces, locally, nationally and internationally – and arguably institutionally as well.

Collecting is now longer something that 19th C gentlemen did. Collecting is an all pervasive cultural activity albeit largely centred on the 21st C expanding middle class.

Increasingly it will be possible to dynamically network these collections and collectors not only within their own networks but also with institutional musingplaces and to wherever the Internet can reach. Should this be realised the research opportunities will grow exponentially in accord. This would also seem to offer substantial regional and community musingplaces key strategic opportunities to enter the field as important players if they were to imagine themselves as being simultaneously at the edge of the field in regard to large institutional musingplaces and in the centre of their community and regional networks.

Arguably in the 21^st C developments like this might well form the cornerstones of cultural research. Furthermore, in the way that Mechanics Institutes did in the 19^th C, regional musingplaces may well be the places and institutions that a likely to play a role in making  real sense of evolving technologies; the opportunities they offer; the cultural and social implications they carry with them. At the same time they might function as proving grounds for the technologies. Likewise, they may well have an important role in making sense of the new cultural realities that evolve within this changing paradigm.

Speculatively, it is possible to imagine musingplaces and their COI operating in dynamic ways within rhizomic networks spreading at the speed of light. This is as opposed to slower moving hierarchical structures where ‘lower order’ constituencies had great difficulty basking with the light of enlightenment.

Clearly academe is in a state of flux and musingplaces seem to be ripe for a paradigm shift in line with shifting social and cultural paradigms. The ‘information economy’ in the 21^st C is already more dynamic and more diverse than anything that might have been understood as such a component of 20^th C cultural and social realities. The winds of change are penetrating deeply into ivory towers. While esotericism is likely to survive it seems that it will be required to contribute to the new paradigms or find hiding places that are not only out of sight but also well away real world dynamics.