Communities of people have many things in which they share a sense of ownership - for example roads, schools, a health service, even a landscape. Those with such an interest form the Community of Ownership and Interest – its COI – for those things.
All too often a COI's shared ownerships and interests are down played and may even be belittled or denied –particularly when contentious or complex issues are involved. However, recognising the layerings of ownerships and interests, and the social cum cultural dynamics involved, can offer a way forward in dispute resolution plus better, and more inclusive, understandings of 'place'.
If we listed 'the things' that had a COI we would include items and locations that were owned by the public – public places and spaces – such as a park, or a river, a monument and/or memorial; an institution and/or a heritage building; a museum; a water supply and/or a forest; a festival and/or a ritual; clearly the list is as endless as the kinds of attachments people have for places, things and events. And the there is the issue of 'cultural property' and 'cultural knowledge' where there are subliminal layers of 'cognitive ownerships' that increasingly come into play with the changing ways Indigenous cultural material – Australian & other – is currently being understood.
Indeed, individuals within a place’s/event's/space's/knowledge system's COI will almost certainly have multiple layers of ownership and interest in it. The ‘truth’ in the ownership and interest here is ‘cognitive,’ a matter of ‘lore’ rather than ‘law’ – that which is taught; hence to do with wisdom; concerning cultural knowledge, traditions and beliefs. It pertains to cognition, the process of knowing, being aware, the acts of thinking, learning and judging. If we take a museum as an exemplar, museums are to do with cognition – musing; the contemplative; the meditative. If we look at courts, then they are to do with power over conduct; enforcement and authority; control and regulation, guilt and innocence – none of which have a place in musing places, nor much to do with musing.
Furthermore, members of the COI should be understood as having both rites and obligations commensurate with their claimed ownership, expressed interest and their relationship to the institution and its overall enterprise.
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 something or a place.
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 have innate understandings of the obligations that are expected of them and the rights they expect to enjoy – indeed, there are likely to be stakeholders in the COI mix.
It is just the case that for an institution say, the COI mix, when assessed from outside, is intentionally, functionally and socially more inclusive. That is more inclusive than say a list of stakeholders drawn up in respect to a development project that governments – Local, State & Federal – typically make decisions about.
Stakeholder groups and Communities of Ownership and Interest are concepts with kindred sensibilities – law and lore, the former reinforcing the latter. Nonetheless, they engage with different community sensibilities; with different expectations and different relationships – even if sometimes many of the same people have a ‘stake’ in something as well as other relationships as a member of a COI.
At the 2002 QVMAG Search Conference governance and marketing were identified as the two issues for the museum that were most in need of urgent attention. For a myriad of reasons, not the least the machinations of Local Government politics, neither have received the kind of attention flagged as being needed at the conference.
Given that marketing is the process by which organisations generate audience interest, and here, engage communities with their services, it is something that a museum's management is obliged to address in the 21st Century. It is the management strategy that underlies the operation's development and legitimises it. It is an integrated process through which organisations build strong community relationships and creates value for their Communities of Ownership and Interest (COI).
THE OWNERSHIP ISSUE
Interestingly, at a 'Search Conference' – a three day affair in 2002 – attended by people interested in the the Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery (QVMAG) the issue of 'ownership' was contested. The attendees, all of whom were self selected, were clearly members of the institution's COI and they clearly understood themselves in that way. That they did so, and collectively, and that they identified themselves as a COI, the issue of 'ownership' in 'lore and law' is not insignificant. it is all the more so in regard to local governance where 'the governors' typically rank themselves at the top of a pyramidal hierarchy in contests of authority.
At the time, Launceston's non-residents were being charged a $10 entry fee to the QVMAG. Attendances were falling and the recurrent costs of the institution were rising – and have done since albeit stabilised in the last decade. Despite the outcomes of this conference and the Chamberlain Report that was commissioned by Council following the conference, and that advocated change for the QVMAG, the institution is in essence currently still trying to address the same set of issues as before 2002 – albeit stimulated by a different set of circumstances. In essence, Council's 'operational wing'has rejected the 'COI concept' in favour of maintaining the 'imagination of the institution's ranked stakeholdership'
There is a very good case to contest this 'understanding' that owes its foundation to 'hierarchical managerialism'. the operational manifestation of this phenomena in recent years has worked assiduously to eclipse Council – the elected representatives – in its policy setting and strategy determination.
Arguably, the City of Launceston – and somewhat perversely – has allowed management to blur the governance and management roles and functions of not only the QVMAG but across the entire 'local governance operation' in the City of Launceston. Moreover, there is a very good case to be put that all this has been, and is being, to the detriment of the city and the Communities of Ownership and Interest across the full spectrum of the city's cultural realities.
Clearly this history played out in the QVMAG has inhibited the effectiveness of the QVMAG's marketing as much as as it has other components of Launceston's cultural landscape and social networks – indeed the city as a whole. It turns out that the QVMAG is the fraction that mirrors the whole and that this is informative.
The 2002 Search Conference was in fact an early demonstration of the levels of the diversity of and the passionately asserted ownerships of and interests people had invested in the QVMAG as institution.
It was also a pointer to the unrealised outcomes and the missed opportunities the museum's governance, and consequently its marketing needs that are yet to be addressed as comprehensively in 2018 as it was identified that it needed to be in 2002.
Ultimately, all this is a 'failure of governance' and there is no other way to dress up the circumstance in order to soften the realisations of faltering outcomes and the diminishment of opportunities.
DEFINITION: Community of Ownership and Interest: (compound noun/proposition) an all-inclusive collective/community of people, individuals and groups, who in any way have multi layered relationships with a place or cultural landscape and/or the operation of an institution, organisation or establishment – typically a network.
Usage and context: cultural geography; civic and environmental planning; and community administration REFERENCE: Dr Bill Boyd, SCU et al
CONTEXT NOTE: Used in opposition to ‘stakeholder’: one who has a legitimate interest, stake and/or pecuniary interest in an enterprise, endeavor or entity. Also used to demonstrate inclusivity as opposed to the exclusive implications attached to ’stakeholder’.
