From a fairly innocuous comment I made at Dinnervention, to an only somewhat well-attended breakout session I co-lead at AFTA last month, to a blog post that only a handful of people read, to the email newsletter that touched off a social media firestorm, it seems that “We Should Allow Failing Arts Organizations to Die” has touched a nerve within our industry. …

The following is the text from a debate I participated in at the Americans for the Arts annual conference in Nashville.

Agree or disagree: we should let arts organizations that don’t adapt die.

Arts organizations are already dying. In Detroit, in New York City, in the UK. From operas to art galleries. This is no longer an urban versus rural debate. A nonprofit versus for profit debate. A “one discipline is dying” but “others are inexplicably thriving” debate.

This is a simple acknowledgement that the industry represented by the people and organizations in this room, is in decline. And I think that not only should we allow it, we should encourage it.

Tracked by their 990s, over the past 20 years, 40% of arts organizations have perished. But they are being replaced even faster. For every arts org that survived between 1990 — 2010, 2.6 …

BREAKING: the Arts Dinner-vention Party did not reach consensus on how to build a movement for the arts, nor how to save the (institutional) arts (organizations). We did discuss, debate, and disagree on a far range of topics: whether we want to be more like co-ops or soup kitchens, if arts orgs as community centers strays too far from our mission, how to hold arts administrators accountable, who will be our growth hackers, if death panels for the weakest (organizations) among us are really a good idea, and what our minimally viable products will be, among many others. The only thing we agreed on was that the arts are not in trouble, it’s the institutions that are failing. …

In about 2 hours, this year’s Sundance Film Festival award winners will be announced. In the past week, there’s been over 35,000 tweets with the #sundance hashtag; more than 40,000 people “talking about” Sundance films on the films’ Facebook page or on the official Sundance Facebook page; 1,300 people have checked in on Foursquare at one of the Park City theatre venues; and nearly 4,000 photos have been tagged #Sundance on Instagram.

Will this social media buzz be any indication of who’s going to win awards tonight? If it is, here’s what we should see:

US Documentary

• The Invisible War has the most people talking about it on both Facebook and Twitter by…

Last year, I took an in-depth look at how Sundance feature films used social media during the Festival, and if social media was a good predictor of a film’s critical or financial success. With 9 days and counting until the 2012 Festival kicks off, I thought I’d take a look to see how films might be using social media differently this year. …

What’s working for arts organizations now? “Once someone likes us on Facebook, what do we do with them? How can we use Twitter to raise money? Can Foursquare really enhance the audience experience? How can Tumblr help us make sense of it all?” Yesterday’s half-day seminar, High Impact Social Media, supported by the Bloomberg Philanthropies arts advancement initiative and the DeVos Institute of Arts Management, attempted to answer just that by bringing together Gary Vaynerchuk (who, if you haven’t seen him, watched him, or read his books, you’re really missing out) and reps from the big 4 social media platforms for a crowd of a few hundred NYC arts managers. …

The Nonprofit Technology Conference uses crowdsourced voting (plus a panel of experts and NTEN staff) to determine which panels to host at their annual conference. As I was perusing and voting on panels myself this afternoon, I started thinking about the value of a single up vote or down vote, and how we might use math to model this user behavior.

Like that other technology conference I just blogged about, they saw a record number of panel submissions this year — about 450 for 100 or so total spots, and have changed up the voting process a bit from last year. …

Next week I’ll be speaking at Arizona State University’s p.a.v.e. program — the performing arts venture experience, one of the few arts incubators in the country. The program offers “arts entrepreneurship classes,” financial ($1-$5k), in-kind (space & materials), and other support (faculty mentors) for “student initiated arts based ventures,” and lots of speakers, workshops, and symposia open to the public. Any ASU student can apply to the program, typically in cross disciplinary groups of 3–5, and are incubated for 7 months. Funded projects can opt-in to allocating 5% of future revenues to the p.a.v.e. program, but so far most of the funding seems to come from the Kauffman Foundation. …