Online participatory projects and exhibitions

Peter PavementSurface Impressionwww.surfaceimpression.com

Engaging with a creative audience

Outside InPallant House Gallery, Chichester

My East EndBishopsgate InstituteFour CornersGeoffrye MuseumBirkbeck College

Snapshot BrightonBrighton Photo FringeWhite Night Nuit BlancheBrighton & Hove City Council

User generated content (UGC), especially creative content (art, photographs, video, creative writing) can be used to:

create an all new show

make a connection between audience

and a collection, a place or a theme.

reach new audiences, who might not be aware of your organisation or what it has to offer

however…

There are a lot of competitors out there, hungry for your audience's contributions

The big ones, Facebook, Twitter, Wordpress etc have the lion’s share of UGC

And there are layers of competition within those services

So submissions to your project can be slow or embarrassingly absent altogether

So what can you do to attract contributions…

Answer: run a competitionA competition ignites interest. People focus on:

The prize If it's relevant to the art form, all the better

The judge(s) They like the chance to validate their work against the opinions of the judges, especially when you have famous names as judges

The deadline The well intended don't keep putting off putting something on your site, they know there's a cut off point

The exposure Being published or exhibited means a lot to most creative people

Curating the submissions

As an extension to the brief of the Outside In exhibition we created an online selection process

The aim of this was to

make selection faster,

fairer for submitting artists

and scalable if there was a large number of applicants

If you’ve ever been on a selection panel, you'll know that:

you assess work very differently at the start than at the end of the day

you can waste a lot of time arguing with other judges

and it takes ages to get through all the submissions

The judges came up with selection criteria and entered them online

Then they rated each piece in turn against that criteria

By making the criteria the only way to assess a piece of work, the judge rates all contributions more fairly

The judge can pause the process and pick it up again at a later hour or day

So the process doesn't have to be so arduous.

The results are displayed as a ranked gallery

The entries and contact information for contributors is all nicely stored and sorted in an online database

So galleries can instantly be created as part of the website.

People can be kept informed of events, exhibition progress and other opportunities by email newsletter

What we've learned

No two competitions are the same, you have to adapt techniques and support for each one

Community groups who submit work for lots of people often need the most support

Live workshops in the space of a museum or gallery generates loads of excellent material

Becoming part of a project like Outside In can make a big difference to people's lives

Audiences respond really favourably to the organisations involved