Full Steem Ahead: Steem-Powered Outdoor History: Pt. 2

- This is a photograph of Rittenhouse Square Park I took during the summer of 2017. Rittenhouse is a popular, open area in the western part of Philadelphia's Center City neighborhood. Would you stop and visit a pop-up exhibit here?

As @engledd explained in the first part of our two-part series on revamping the culture sector here, a great way to engage a broader audience in cultural programming is to bring it to them. This same idea, however, could work in one’s favor regarding fundraising via a platform like Steemit.

For example, to continue with our Spanish Flu pop-up concept, we as a cultural collective could create posts based on the content we intended for ultimate inclusion in the exhibit. Per our preliminary proposal, we suggested the inclusion of multiple narratives, including those from women, African Americans, and people with intellectual and developmental disability and how they were each impacted by the disease. Accordingly, we could easily create multiple posts encompassing these subjects and including the images and so on that we would include in the exhibit.

Creating content as you build and prepare for the exhibit itself is a fine way to generate funds through Steemit, but it also offers an opportunity that most museums and cultural institutions are never offered: community feedback from the start. To this end, in addition to posting about the exhibit’s content, a project could post their plans for the exhibit, how they plan to design and organize the information and ultimately present it to their audience. At the end of each of these posts the author can ask their readers their thoughts. Would an exhibit like this appeal to you? If so why? If not, why not? The readers could contribute to an ongoing conversation throughout the project’s various posts about what they like or would tweak within our project. This is an opportunity cultural institutions never get: the opportunity to build an exhibit with community input and feedback from the beginning. Too often feedback does not occur until an exhibit’s “soft open,” which takes place before the real exhibit opening as a means of gauging initial response to the exhibit. At that point, it’s usually too late to make any substantial changes.

- This photo was taken at the Independence Seaport Museum's opening for their exhibit on the Cruiser Olympia, a U.S. warship from the late 19th and early 20th Century. At this point all revisions were done and the exhibit as we experienced it that day was how it would remain. Photo courtesy of Dr. Hilary Lowe.

With Steemit as a tool at our disposal as a hypothetical cultural institution, we have a vast community of shareholders and interested parties who could share their thoughts with us directly from the beginning. Although Philadelphia’s Steemit community is not nearly as large as those in cities like New York, by crediting the feedback received through Steemit’s global community (Viewers Like You™) we could contribute to the further development and growth of Philadelphia’s own Steemit community, perhaps through the participation of other cultural institutions and museums who wish to emulate our own model of exhibit development and community engagement.

Ultimately we hope our model would expose and open new audiences to history, especially those who don’t usually go to museums. We hope our success using Steemit for both funding and exhibit development would encourage other Philadelphia cultural institutions to consider doing the same.

For now, however, help us out by answering the following in the comments! What content would be interesting to you in a pop-up exhibit? How would you feel about providing feedback on a prospective exhibit here on Steemit? Do you think presenting content from the prospective exhibit ahead of time as a means of fundraising would be a good idea, and would that be something you would want to support?

100% of the SBD rewards from this #explore1918 post will support the Philadelphia History Initiative @phillyhistory. This crypto-experiment conducted by graduate courses at Temple University's Center for Public History and MLA Program, is exploring history and empowering education. Click here to learn more.