The QVMAG‘s Community of Ownership and Interest

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

• visitors to the museum’s campus and visitors to its website;
• participants in off site programs and projects;
• the people who made, used, owned, collected or who have gifted items held in the collections;
• staff members and volunteers;
• researchers, lecturers, teachers and students;
• ratepayers, government funding agencies, sponsors and donors;
• cultural institutions, project partners and service providers;
• plus others who identify with and have 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/conflicting, layers of ownership and interest in the museum. Furthermore, some will be seen as "stakeholders" and even understand themselves as such. Typically, Stakeholders are ranked – Key Stakeholders, Primary Stakeholders, Secondary Stakeholders – which in the end casts a stakeholder in a different light to that which might be applied to a member of a COI. By ranking stakeholdership the emphasis shifts towards rights rather than obligations in an attempt to deliver an outcome in conflict that accommodates stakeholders in accord with their stake-cum-equity in an issue, project, whatever. 

Members of a museum's COI should be understood as having both rights and obligations commensurate with their ownership, their interest and/or their relationship to the museum enterprise and its collections. 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 and ultimately it will be assess differently and subjectively from different people's perspective.

As above, 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.

Typically, 'stakeholders' assert their rights when there is a contentious decision to be made that directly impacts upon them. 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're not articulated. In the QVMAG's case, Launceston's residents and ratepayers meet an obligation by paying a QVMAG levy embedded in their rates or rent.

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

INDEX

The Ownership of the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery and its Collections – click here
The QVMAG and the Tasmanian Local Government Act 1993 – click here
Ownership and Marketing – click here