OpenCulture

OK, so next year is going to be a nightmare. How much of a nightmare, nobody yet knows, but we are starting to discern the shape of how some arts and culture organisations are going to react. People everywhere are freezing recruitment, asking staff to act up into vacant posts and - most importantly - to accelerate redundancies in order to contract out committed work.

As a tactic, it’s straight from the first page of Management for Beginners, and it works - up to a point. It enables organisations to invest in this current year (in the costs of redundancies) in order to achieve savings next year. It also mitigates some of the risk of what’s coming next year by replacing difficult permanent contracts with ones that are shorter and easier to cancel.

So far so businesslike - but what it means is that in the next 18 months, we’re likely to see a loss of skills from the sector on a scale which few of us have ever experienced. In a world in which we were already bemoaning the loss of curatorial expertise, we’re likely to see a wholesale attrition of museological and Collections Management knowledge, infrastructure and experience as the cuts bite deep.

As I’ve said before, I believe we’re heading towards a ’self-help’ sector. Which sounds ridiculous, of course, when you realise that the sector has always, to an extent, run on a filigree of personal and professional networks and contacts. But whereas this social/professional infrastructure has hitherto coexisted with a well-funded stratum of professional support agencies, it is soon to become the primary channel for professional development in museums, culture and arts organisations.

This prospect raises a very interesting possibility, and one which I believe we should proactively pursue in the coming months. If we don’t have access to in-house skills, and we don’t have budget to contract skills, then there is a possible third way - which is to use the network effect in the cultural profession to build a barter economy, in which skills and time are traded as real, tangible assets for our institutions.

Imagine the scenario - your library has bought a scanner and trained someone in how to use it. You also have a rare books collection but have lost the person who knew about ventilation and mould prevention. You advertise a trade - a few hours access to the scanner with a skilled member of staff in return for an afternoon’s training in basic preservation. A museum a few miles up the road responds, provides the training and scans some prints.

One of the really interesting things about this kind of skills trading is that 80% of the benefits are not the immediate outcomes (the scanning, the training), but in the intangible social and professional capital that comes out of making a connection, working with someone, supporting one another. In a way, it’s our own professional version of a Big Society (we’ll call it a Big Sector for now).

Before I go any further, I should wholeheartedly acknowledge that what I am suggesting is nothing new. Not only does it exist in many other industries (eg. skillsbarter.com), it already exists in the culture sector, in the form of the magnifient SHARE project in the East of England.

SHARE is one of those ideas that comes along every once in awhile that has the potential to be genuinely revolutionary. It harnesses the power of social and professional interaction, enabling people to develop (mostly) self-organising networks through which people share their knowledge and expertise. SHARE has already enabled the development of networks in a number of areas, including:

• Museums archaeology
• Natural history
• Costume and textiles
• Audience development
• Design and display
• Museum learning

SHARE also provides a conduit for bringing the funded layer of expertise and knowledge - from people like Museum Development Officers (it’s primarily a museum thing at the moment, because of its genesis in Renaissance), freelancers and curatorial advisers - to bear in a much better-targeted way which is capable of meeting genuine, on-the-ground needs. Organisations can flag a need, or make a proposal, and can call on assistance from across the entire network (there’s even a workflow for delivering collaborative, SHARE-based projects).

Of course, everything isn’t really as rosy and sylvanian as SHARE makes it look. Yes, it took Renaissance funding to kick-start the network and yes, it takes a highly motivated, focussed and visionary coordinator like Simon Floyd to make it happen, and yes, it takes time, money and effort to keep it going, but as I said before, the value goes far beyond the simple access to skills and knowledge. It builds bonds between individuals and organisations. Because it promotes self-reliance and cooperation, it builds confidence in the sector. Because the feedback is very real, and very immediate, it makes people feel good about supporting each other.

I’m not saying SHARE is perfect, but the skills economy is going to look very, very different in two years time. In place of centralised, monolithic authority structures, we’re likely to see the emergence of networks, Subject Specialists, barter, subscription-based consultancy and self-starting local and sub-regional action, all of which are designed to help people, by helping each other.

The idea of sharing skills also caused me to think about the fact that museums in particular are regularly involved in reciprocal agreements which involve the transfer of funds. Take loans as an example - museums of a reasonable size will regularly be both charging for loans and paying out to other museums worldwide. And since a lot of these transactions are cross-currency, they incur the penalty of exchange fees and fluctuating rates.

How much more efficient would it be, if we think of museums, libraries, archives and the arts as a closed loop - a community of sufficient scale to make collective action feasible - to evolve the concept of bartering in order to develop a currency of our own? How much better would it be, instead of converting pounds to Euro and back again, simply to exchange a currency that is held in trust between two parties and which can be traded between insitutions within the network.

Imagine a scenario - you have a large-scale project, perhaps a transfer from an old store to a new one. You have a complex, multi-part project which needs specific skilled intervention at specific points. The costs of specifying and tendering for skills are high, and besides the scale of the work (reviewing the security provision for the new site, for example) might not justify it.  Imagine that, instead, you convert some funds into a Culture Currency and use these Culture Dollars to buy an afternoon of someone’s time. Imagine then that they keep their currency in an account until it has built up to the point where they could afford to do something on a scale which would never otherwise be financially possible.

You might think this is a ridiculous suggestion, but actually it is surprisingly easy to invent a currency - at least one that acts as a token of exchange of nominal value that is agreed between parties (it is technically illegal in most countries to set up a monetary currency!) Like all ideas that depend on collective action across the culture sector, it is unlikely ever to happen, but the germ of the idea - of exchanging, earning, storing and spending not money but tokens of value which can be used to ‘buy’ skills, time, support, mentoring or any of the other elements of the new ’soft’ economy could well be the answer to a lot of people’s prayers.

Tags: SHARE, skills

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 22nd, 2010 at 10:31 pm and is filed under Business Models, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.