I figured the Gardner was probably in this category but I haven't been there for a while and it wasn't obvious from online.

Many museums in the UK are nominally free (although they encourage a donation) and they charge for special exhibitions. A few in France are free. Can't speak to more broadly. (And, yes, free museums are pretty uncommon in the US although they exist--especially at universities, most of the Smithsonian Museums, and so forth.) Fairly broad experience even if it's often been in conjunction with work travel.

I've only been to a play (staged reading) at the new one but, in general, I'm not sure how interested most adults are in interactivity. I've been to the Exploratorium for an event and it was fun. (Having those sort of distractions are nice when you're tired of feeling like you need to speak to people at an event.) But not sure I'd have made a trip there otherwise.

I'd categorize both those groups as being "in tech." Even if they're not active developers, they're certainly tech-adjacent especially in the software space.

There are probably counter-examples, but I'm not sure where I'd go if I were, say, an enthusiastic amateur physics or chemistry enthusiast of some sort that would be especially accessible.

Go to a big city art museum and they're swarming with school groups.

As a tangent, I find it a bit annoying that so many UK museums advertise free pretty aggressively and then provide such "very strong encouragement" as you put it to attend. Mind you, there's less direct pressure than there is in some places. The Met in NYC used to have an optional but not really optional policy for museum admission as you got your pin though it now not optional at all for non-NYC residents.

You have to keep those sort of museums up to date. As I recall the Computer History Museum in Boston, they had some interesting historical artifacts like Sage I think. But a fair bit of the museum was devoted to supposedly state of the art computing, some interactive. As a lot of the local computer companies went away, a lot of the the exhibits started looking pretty dated--and I'm sure a lot of funding dried up as well.

Yes. Especially a lot of older and mustier museums have very little in the way of explanation related to the exhibits.

I grudgingly did it for a while to Boston. And yes, it was something like $50/day to commute however I did it. It got old even on the train even though I didn't need to go in every day. Wouldn't have done it long-term.

>I'd love to know how you can effectively manage a team by constantly being in meetings with other managers.

Hopefully, they work meetings with their team in but meeting with other managers is a big part of their job--and shielding people from stuff coming down from above.