APPENDIX #2: The Museum’s Community of Ownership and Interest (COI)

The museum‘s Community of Ownership and Interest (COI) should be understood to include:

• visitors to the museum’s campus;
• visitors to its website;
  
• participants in offsite programs and projects;
  
• the people who made, used, owned, collected or who have gifted items held in the collections;
  
• staff members and volunteers;
  
• researchers and lecturers;
  
• teachers and students;
  
• government agencies;
  
• cultural institutions;
  
• service providers;
  
• project partners,
• sponsors and others with an interest in the museum and its collections – intellectual and other.

Indeed, individuals within the museum’s COI will almost certainly have multiple, and sometimes competing, layers of ownership and interest in the museum.

Furthermore, members of the COI should be understood as having both rightes and obligations commensurate with their claimed ownership, their expressed interest and their relationship to the museum enterprise and its collections. Also, it is counterproductive to attempt to rank one ownership as being more important than another as 'importance' will always depend on the issue at hand.

A member of the COI may also be referred to as a “stakeholder” but stakeholdership in its current usage has generally come to mean a person, group, business or organisation that has some kind vested or pecuniary interest in say a project or a place.

Typically, stakeholders self identify, self assess their importance/ranking and assert their rights . However, they are rarely called upon to meet an obligation. A COI member is less likely to self identify but nonetheless will have they will have obligations they are expected to meet and rights to enjoy – there are likely to be stakeholders included in the COI mix.

Typically, 'stakeholders' assert their rights when there is a contentious decision to be made. However, 'stakeholders' are rarely called upon to meet or acknowledge an obligation. Conversely, members of a COI will often have innate understandings of their obligations and the rights they expect to enjoy – indeed, they typically assume that they have these ‘rights’ even when they not articulated.

Stakeholder groups and Communities of Ownership and Interest are concepts with kindred sensibilities. Nonetheless, they engage with different community networks with different expectations and relationships – even if sometimes many of the same people are involved.

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Foreword
Background
Policy Making QVMAG
Proposed Membership: Interim Board of Governors
Proposed Tasks: Interim Board of Governors
APPENDIX #1: Notes on Special Purpose Commissioner
APPENDIX #2: Notes on Community of Ownership & Interest
LINK: Submission to Tas State Govt. CLICK HERE
LINK: Open Letter QVMAG Governance CLICK HERE