I noticed last week that a presentation I’d given three years ago on the museum of the future had disappeared from the site that had been created for the event, so I’ve uploaded a version of the presentation to Slideshare. The Museums of the Long Now event at City University had explored how museums might evolve. I’d posted some notes here at the time.

While I was looking, I also found a piece of work which I’d done for the Arts Council in 2005 on ‘thriving in the 21st century’ which had been put online  – in powerpoint here, with the full report here (opens pdf). The argument runs as follows:

Thriving requires a consistency of approach to output, structure, users, and talent, but this on its own is not enough. The missing ingredient is that the thriving organisation is able to construct a web of relationships with other, different, organisations. In doing so it gains access through co-operation to talent, or to resources, or to audiences, which would otherwise be closed to it. Such collaboration creates outcomes which are greater than the sum of its parts.

The report suggests that these relationships also create innovation pathways which can link new work to different audiences. Openness, as I have argued elsewhere, is a feature of success in the 21st century, and one where cultural organisations create models which other organisations could learn from.