New England Museum Association

The New England Museum Association will explore the "generative meetups" concept by launching the Museumhive project. This new professional development model will connect regional museum professionals with thought leaders to create local content on topics of national interest to the museum profession. The initial theme will focus on "the distributed museum," a museum not bound by its physical location but integrated throughout its community. The project will support six in-person meetups featuring presentations by national thought leaders talking about their work via live Google Hangouts. After each meetup, staff and volunteers will index and archive the Hangout video, summarize the event on a Wordpress site, invite additional contributions via email and Twitter, and then prepare a short e-publication summary designed to help staff connect the topic to their own experiences at their museums. This experimental format for hive-created content will be shared with other museum associations for national replication.