Democracy:Devolved

Submitted by: Chris Wood

Describe your idea. What will you do?

Cover your eyes for a moment and ignore the grand buildings and glittering artefacts....just think about what museums DO. They're organisations that de-code issues and cultures for people to understand in an arena that's non-partisan and more levelheaded than almost anywhere. No copies to sell, ratings to chase, advertising targets to meet, or dogma to dispense. Just somewhere safe to explore ideas. Now imagine using that for democracy. We want to turn museums' firepower on modern issues (migration, energy, genetics, etc) to help people understand them properly; deeply even. And then use their trust amongst the population (near the top of every survey of trust), their inspirational but non-partisan approach to issues, and their physical space, to allow debate, deliberation and decision. The crucial bit is to do this WITH visitors, so the process is democratic too. What we want to do is allow one museum to test this out with a hatful of ideas like personal museums of people's perspectives on issues, community collecting of artefacts that illustrate points of view, community curating of exhibitions about subjects, and co-creation of museums themselves. All of it based around crucial contemporary issues in desperate need of democratic debate. To take an example, imagine every visitor creates a personal museum on the subject of genetics and what it means to them (with the help and resources of the museum team); groups of them might then make a collection of artefacts to illustrate their view; they might then all turn this into a small exhibition about the various viewpoints on genetics, measure the responses of their viewers with live comments boards and incorporate those into the evolution of the work. All of this could be facilitated by the museum and end up becoming part of its permanent collection, recording for the future how and why we made the decisions we did about genetics in the 21st Century.

What will the benefits be?

The benefits to the visitors will be a chance to engage with a museum and their peers on a more equal basis, use museums' resources and expertise to investigate and express issues of contemporary concern, and marshall their collective views into an exhibition and a message. Museums will learn how to work more democratically with their visitors, use their resources to both discuss democracy, and behave democratically. We will all learn some democratic literacy and whether this idea is potentially scaleable to the 26 million people that make 80 million visits to the UK's 2,500 museums with their 1 billion artefacts (or, if you prefer, more people than go to football, more museums than the big four supermarkets put together, and sufficient artefacts to stretch the 385,000km from here to the moon) - in short, enough to reach nearly everyone, nearly everywhere with some inspirational everyday democracy.

Who will you target?

In the beginning, we'd target the visitors to just one museum to test the ideas. We are already working with some that might be the best candidates and the trials could be easily shared across the network.

Is your idea linked to a particular town or region?

This idea isn't linked to a particular locality, though it would be tested locally first.

What kind of assistance would you like from others?

I'd welcome some initial comments on the ideas to help us refine them, especially since I suspect we may have to overcome people's traditional view of museums as simply boxes of delights, rather than organisations with social, cultural, educational and democratic bite.