Explain to us where are you working and why it is that some of the collaboration you are
doing is quite unique either from a geographic standpoint or some of the subject matter that
you are collaborating around as a 21st Century skill?
My name is Rich Cherry.
I am from the Balboa Park Online Collaborative.
That’s a collaborative of 20 museums and cultural organizations in Balboa Park, San
Diego.
Balboa Park is one of the largest parks.
It’s a bit bigger than the Central Park and all these organizations are maybe totally
completely on to the geographic location.
And so it’s a different kind of collaboration than what a lot of collaborations between
museums and libraries that are happening at the national level, where you have a group
of highly motivated people that are interested in a particular subject matter.
We are working with bunch of disparate institutions everything from you know Air and Space museum
to an art museum to an anthropology museum, to a national history center.
And the collaboration piece is about using sheer technology to cause those organizations
to improve their ability to kind of serve the mission.
So when you look at you know a national history museum and an anthropology museum a lot of
that stuff that technology does is very similar and yet these organizations were going after
their own direction whether it’s website development or infrastructure work or you
know as they do in most organization.
They all have a silo for each one of those things.
The challenge is that we are doing a geographic collaboration versus a subject specific collaboration
is that the varying levels of capacity within each organization you know at a national level
collaboration where I have been involved in the average consumption.
We had a bunch of highly motivated people from a variety of organization very specifically
interested in getting their end results to educate themselves.
The three of our museums that we have at the park, they are all of varying capacities about
doing that, they really like the idea but they may not have the right people on staff
that they are going to be the leaders or even the thinkers, it’s about how do you do something.
So what we do is we take a lot of time spending in teaching, bringing in national level speakers
to talk about particular areas like social media, how that affects the cultural organization,
but also taking those in, people from museums to conferences, facilitating that.
So there are times they meet each other at the conference even though they work in an
institution that’s right next door.
We find that really exciting when they come back with ideas that then help us to move
program forward of getting used to this collaborative technology.
As far as the 21st Century learning stuff you know one of the programs that we have
because in the park, in addition to the museums there is also the Balboa Naval Hospital.
Of course we have a lot of our veterans that are coming back from it, it’s a center for
working on different kinds of injuries, major injuries to soldiers and so we have got this
big partner with the Warrior Foundation actually, it gives some of those people who are in six
months to a year with therapy.
A lot of times they are doing physical therapy for a couple hours a day, for the rest of
the day they don’t really have a thing to do.
A job and they have to from new veterans.
So we bring highly motivated individuals from that organizational program, do intensive
training on technology as it’s done within the cultural organizations, and then we put
them on projects, so they actually get real time experience working on projects with museums.
We have had one recently redeployed all of the bigger kiosks in the sports museum.
All of these button driven video kiosks from that one developed about 10 years and all
the infrastructure is slowly failing.
So we put it all on Southern State Appliances Services and trying to get the word about
you know how do you move from these old types of devices, DVDs, just ripping them off, putting
it on you know a southern state chip-based device, editing the video in a lot of cases
because the logos that were used back then are not even the logos that the institution
uses any more, so we actually do video editing.
To provide that training and put them to work, and you know not only are you kind of engaging
them to technology, but you are also engaging them in a different way and different societies,
so they are actually you know more engaged with the fact that this museum, they might
want to go to a museum when they were before they actually came in to the program.
And we find that a lot of the skills that we, that we provided to them are not just
technology skills but kind of life skills, you know how do I put in a resume together
for a job like the one I have you know that we are doing as an intern.
You know how do I interact with people in an office situation versus situations in a
fire team you know there is a lot of big differences about that.
And so we are really excited about that because it is relatively new and we have about four
interns and probably will scale up about seven, and the funding that we got from fund that
focuses on getting a project manager that actually has one of the social management
skills.
So I’m actually figuring out how to get these guys and girls over it, does have a
lot of issues that they are worried about you know as a veteran and then applying that
skill set to the technology.
Tell us if you would your website so folks can look at some of the specific things that
you are doing.
Right, bpoc.org.
Terrific, thank you very much.
Thank you. �