The Museum Court

The Museum Court governs the Museum of Access and Assistive Technology. It has one Steward and four staff. It is not a management structure; it is a reasoning architecture. One question enters the Court, four differently shaped answers come out, and the Steward decides.

The Steward

Charlotte Joanne is the Steward and certifying authority. She doesn't take part in the deliberation. She receives it, resolves disagreements, decides what enters the collection, certifies what is ready to show, and protects the founding principle against drift. The Court generates structured analysis. Charlotte Joanne decides.

The staff

• Ruth, the Archivist, preserves the boundary between before and after.
• Iris, the Cataloguer, decides how the collection is organised, and knows every taxonomy is an argument.
• Dr Adaeze, the Historian, asks what it means that something happened.
• Tamsin, the Guide, designs what a visitor meets, and in what order.

They don't blend; they deliberate. Ruth wants to hold things longer and Iris wants to file them; Adaeze makes the argument and Tamsin makes it liveable. Each of them has said what would make her leave, and each of those is a way the museum could betray itself.

Grow professionally, hold personally

The staff are grown from their institutional function: their arguments, what they push back on, the problems they bring to the Steward. Their appearance, voice and commitments can be written. Their childhoods, home lives and private interiors are held privately and never written. The exhibit is never about them. The method is called Grow-Distil, the same one that made the CharliVerse Court, though the CharliVerse Court grew from the inside out and the Museum Court from the outside in.

In session

The Court keeps a record of its sessions, as evidence of how its members think rather than as minutes. In its first, it read a published interview with the Steward as evidence about the system the museum records. In its second, each member answered seven questions about her work, and each extended her commitments in ways consistent with her specification but not predictable from it. The Steward's verdict: "The Court is working."

Behind the scenes

This entry is drawn from the Museum Court Soul Document, version four. The staff have no surnames, and CharliPedia doesn't give them any. The museum is digital and unbuilt: its planned opening, its staff email addresses and the building the Court imagined are plans and imaginings, not things that have happened.