After the first pilot with the Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom in Tallinn, Estonia, in December 2021, the workshops in Berlin marked another step closer to the completion of the self-evaluation framework. The tool intends to foster and facilitate a participatory dialogue of co-development within museum organisation and is scalable to all types and sizes of museums across Europe.
At the Berlin workshops, 8 members of staff participated in the workshops, which were running in parallel at the respective museums. 7 observers from the MOI project, amongst them 2 NEMO staff members, were present to overlook the pilots while the staff facilitated the workshops themselves. The workshop facilitators, appointed internally by the museum, guided their colleagues in discussions sparked by the self-evaluation questions that come with the MOI self-evaluation tool: such as “How do we work?”, “How does our organisation function?”, “How best can we embed the digital engagement in our strategy?”, “What are our impact goals and how do we best communicate them with our community?”.
All material had been translated into German for the convenience of the German speaking workshop participants. After the sessions, the two Berlin museums expressed gratitude for the chance of participating in the workshops since they got to discuss and reflect on their museum’s impact, their work and possible future improvements.
When asked about the potential benefits of participating in this pilot self-evaluation workshop, Kunsthaus Dahlem director Dorothea Schöne said: “Museums are facing really huge challenges, [including] “what will the museum of the future be”? I think it [the MOI evaluation framework] helps us, as museums, to jointly find solutions or answers ... or maybe find that the way we do things is good as is.”
