A participatory protocol for collective decision-making in cultural organisations

Over the last decades, museums and cultural organisations in Europe are increasingly turning towards inclusive and collaborative approaches to engaging with the public. While participatory work has become present in diverse forms and levels across sectoral practice, effective tools and frameworks for embedding participation into governance and everyday decision-making are still relatively scarce. This gap highlights a critical need for experimenting with participatory designs that enable cultural organisations to pursue and practically realise open and democratic modes of management and organisational processes. Along these lines, the contribution of this paper is twofold: First, it opens a window into the functioning of decision-making processes in cultural organisations. Second, it proposes and experimentally tests a protocol for participatory decision-making with cultural organisations in France, Greece and Germany. The protocol involves, first, an "anonymous" stage in which participants engage in a two-step "proposal-then-Borda voting" process. Each participant's proposed agenda is the ideal combination of traits of a project to be developed by the team. Once all the proposed projects are received and anonymously presented to all participants, a Borda voting rule is applied to select the "winning" project. A brainstorming session follows, where participants publicly discuss the winning project and propose variations or major modifications until a unanimous decision is reached. This protocol was developed and tested in three real-world collective decision-making sessions with members of cultural organisations during participatory workshops in Dijon, Athens and Berlin. The protocol shaped decisions openly and democratically, combining (i) endogenous project agenda formation, which translates individual preferences into sets of alternative solutions, (ii) a Borda rule-assisted collective choice, where members vote the most preferred solution, and (iii) consensual brainstorming deliberation, where the winner of the preceding proposal and voting stages serve as a starting point. The protocol can be used to support modes of democratic management in cultural organisations, by assisting a decision-making practice that enables members to learn their own and others' preferences while navigating complex, multidimensional choices across organisation strategy, programming and day-to-day operation problems.