"Lessons Learned" shares the lessons that these ten original Open Studio training organizations learned while bringing artists and arts organizations into the digital culture. The report provides detailed information on the first year of our program (1997-1998), during which over 300 members of the arts community received training.

Outreach & Recruitment
How did sites get artists excited about Open Studio in the first place?
Mentor sites used a variety of methods -- both traditional and electronic -- to spark interest in the arts community, conquer artists' fears of technology and introduce them to its potential benefits to their lives and work.

Selection
How and why did sites choose the participants they chose?
When it came to choosing trainees, Mentor sites established selection criteria that supported their Open Studio goals and mission. Although sites differed widely in their reasons for choosing participants, at the close of the first Phase many had come to the common conclusion that their selection criteria required revision, both to improve the efficacy of their programs and to build a more cohesive community within their training groups.

Goals & Training Approaches
What did sites want to get out of Open Studio and how did they plan to achieve it?
Whether the Mentor site was an arts council or a public access provider, a visual arts agency or an arts education program, these institutions took innovative approaches to making their Open Studio goals work to produce Web-savvy artists and arts organizations with clear goals and a strong vision of their future with technology.

Structure of Workshops
How was the training set up and why did they do it that way?
The structure of training programs frequently reflected a site's goals in implementing Open Studio. Many Mentor sites found scheduling training classes to be a huge and unexpected challenge.

Workshop Curricula
What software and training tools were used and why?
There are as many ways to accomplish training as there are trainers and students. To reach their Open Studio training goals, trainers used any means necessary to get their students up to speed and Web pages up on the Internet.

Each-One-Teach-One
Open Studio's unique community-building concept; what was it, and did it work?
Open Studio's first phase included an element called "Each-One-Teach-One," a community-building initiative that asked trainees to go forth after an initial training period to train other artists and arts organizations in their communities. Ultimately, although it was an attractive idea with a laudable concept, it was not completed by a number of sites. Find out why.

Partnerships
Not everyone can be an artist and a technology expert; who some sites partnered with and what they contributed to the process.
The organizations involved in Open Studio come from a wide variety of backgrounds. In many cases, the organization's role in the community is specialized, and it may not have either the technological or the artistic background to pull together a project with a joint focus like this one. In several cases, the solution to the problem was to form partnerships with arts organizations or technical providers in their communities or regions. Here are a few of our program partnerships.

Integration into Organizations
How did sites incorporate Open Studio into their organizational missions?
Open Studio recognizes that for many organizations -- for-profit and non-profit alike -- the process of integrating a Web presence into their organizational structure is very complicated. So we asked our Mentor sites whether they were able to integrate their Open Studio program into their organizational structure, and if so, how they achieved it. This is what they had to say.

Content
Content regulation and how sites addressed it.
National Open Studio does not set limits on the content produced by regional trainees. Individual Mentor sites took responsibility for setting limits on controversial content created by its trainees for publication on their servers. Here are the lessons they learned from their experiences in our first year.

Evaluation
How did sites define and measure success?
To determine whether a project is successful, an evaluator needs to know two things: 1) How is success quantified? 2) What method of evaluation should be used to determine the degree of success or failure? Open Studio sites used similar methods of evaluation, but their definitions of success varied widely.

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