The Legler Benbough Foundation, in San Diego California, has always recognized that cultural institutions in Balboa Park play a critical role in the cultural life of the City. Over the past 20 years the Foundation has focused significant resources on these institutions and their supporting environment, Balboa Park. The objectives of this funding are as follows:

• To enhance collaboration and cooperation of the institutions to achieve joint objectives and to take advantage of the opportunities that are available because of their location together;
• To support programs of outstanding artistic merit which may not have sufficient audience appeal to allow their presentation without outside support;
• To support efforts to insure the relevance of the institutions in a rapidly changing community; and
• To insure the viability of the park and the maintenance of a park environment in which the institutions can flourish.

Inherent in serving these goals was the funding of significant duplication of services as each institution operates as an independent entity. Each organization independently had a website, a base of software and technology and in some cases dedicated technology staff. For example: when funding was asked for by an organization to add an innovative feature to their website the benefit was restricted to that organization and patrons of that website.

In 2008 the foundation began to consider ways to encourage technology collaboration among the Balboa Park Institutions in order to enable better online access to institutional resources while attaining some cross organizational benefit to its investments. To this end they engaged cultural informatics consultant David Bearman of Archives & Museum Informatics. David began work on this project in the Fall of 2008 by convening meetings of executive, program and technical staff from organizations in Balboa Park. Out of these meetings a each group indentified a set of high level goals and functional areas around which online collaboration would be beneficial:

Goals:

• Increase visitation to Balboa Park as a whole and to the individual institutions
• Increase public participation in Balboa Park institutions’ programs
• Achieve greater collaboration, integration, and synergy among all the institutions
• Establish Balboa Park as an integrated learning environment, both virtual and real
• Ensure coordination with goals of 2015 Centennial Celebration

Functional Areas:

• Content Management System (education, curatorial/collections/visitor services/intranet),
• Online transactions (membership/donations/ticketing/sales/registration),
• Shared Technology services

In my next post I will outline how these requirements turned into BPOC