Thanks for your thoughts – I think, for us, the main reason to do this on the blog is the curator in question has easy access to that forum. She’s not on Facebook or Twitter directly, so it makes it a little easier for her to have a one-on-one discussion. That said we do feel it’s important that the dialog around the issue stay public on the other channels as well, so we will be tweeting again to both point out the current discussion and remind folks they can contribute there.

In the past, we have used twitter with a hashtag for other controversial matters where we wanted visitor response (the budget cuts and suggested admission hikes of last summer come to mind). That works well when we want to see incoming response, but for dialog we find the blog tends to work better – especially around complicated issues that require more than 140 characters. We did something similar for issues around the costume collection and found, as a place for dialogue, it worked pretty well all around.