REMIX – Global Summit on Culture, Technology & Entrepreneurship

images-1.jpgJoin creative pioneers from across the globe at REMIX Summit London, 2nd-3rd December 2014. This is the flagship chapter in a series of global summits on Culture, Technology and Entrepreneurship. REMIX Summits are produced in collaboration with worldwide partners Google, Bloomberg & Dubai Design District, and media partners The Guardian, Time Out & The Art Newspaper. The 3rd REMIX Summit London follows sell-out events in Sydney and New York.

REMIX Summits tackle the big ideas shaping the future of the cultural industries and the creative economy. Uniting creative leaders from different sectors including technology, media and arts, they provide a ground-breaking forum for exchanging insights, growing ideas and working together towards common goals.

REMIX Summit London 2014 takes place at Google’s incredible Town Hall event space in their London HQ just off Tottenham Court Road.

More information can be found at www.remixsummits.com

Over 50 world class speakers will take to the stage over 2 days, including:

Amit Sood, Director, Cultural Institute, Google // Justine Roberts, Founder & CEO, Mumsnet // Sir Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director, Barbican Centre // Fergus Linehan, Festival Director, Edinburgh International Festival // Fabien Riggall, Creative Director and Founder of Future Shorts & Secret Cinema // Stuart Trevor, Co-founder, AllSaints & Co-founder, Bolongaro Trevor // Tim Arthur, CEO, Time Out // Michael Morris, Co-Director, Artangel // Ruth Mackenzie CBE, Interim CEO / Launch Director, The Space // Simon Walker, Chief Strategy Officer, Rightster // Chris Wild, Director, Retronaut // Helen Marriage, Director, Artichoke // Chris Michaels, Head of Digital, The British Museum // Maddy Carroll, Campaigns Director, 38 Degrees // Kelly Sawdon, Chief Branding Officer, Ace Hotels // Lindsay Miller, Managing Director, Dubai Design District // Mike Sarna, Director, Programming & Exhibitions, Royal Museums Greenwich & many more…


“Building Effective Creative Clusters” Conference

This conference will address practical ideas to unlock the economic value of the Creative & Cultural Industries: expert speakers and panelists will be discussing practical ideas to unlock the economic value of the Creative & Cultural Industries.

The Conference programme includes sessions on:

  • Developing strategies and services within creative clusters
  • Effective co-working and Incubation Centres for Creative Clusters
  • How Creative Industries can add real value in your city or region
  • Cross-sectoral and Cross-cluster collaboration – a catalyst for real growth

Register now! 

ecia

About the European Creative Industries Alliance (ECIA)

ECIA is an integrated policy initiative that combines policy learning with 8 concrete actions on innovation vouchers, better access to finance and cluster excellence & cooperation. It is an open platform that brings together policy-makers and business support practitioners from 28 partner organisations and 12 countries. Its overall aim is to shape a community in Europe that actively supports creative industries as a driver for competitiveness, job creation and structural change by developing and testing better policies and tools for creative industries.

The conference is free of charge and is organised by the Cluster2020 and European Creative Cluster Lab Partners. To attend this conference on 25 November, please register here

 

Other events taking place at the same venue the days before and after this conference.

– 24 Nov: ECCL pilot training on cross-sectorial innovation and collaboration among creative clusters (contact MFG directly about this at acheson@mfg.de);
–  26-27 Nov: EBN #TechCamp, with a special focus on creative industries.

This event will be organised by the Cluster2020 and European Creative Cluster Lab Partners and showcases the final results and findings from both of these ECIA actions.


Conference Girona 2014 Archives and Cultural Industries

by Sofie Taes, KU Leuven

The program of the monumental, multi-disciplinarian conference on archives and cultural industries held in Girona’s Palau de Congressos (13-15 October), and co-organized by EuropeanaPhotography-partner Ajuntament de Girona (CRDI), featured several members of our consortium: Antonella Fresa presented the PREFORMA-project, Nacha Van Steen led a double workshop connected with the EuPh-vocabulary, and my KU Leuven-colleague and project coordinator Fred Truyen was scheduled for a talk about All Our Yesterdays in the afternoon of day 1.

EUPH official logoAccompanying Fred, I took the opportunity to immerse myself in the wave of inspiration that oozed from the enthusiasm, the creativity and the out-of-the-box solutions to manifold challenges that younger and older professionals from both sectors presented. After an impressive plenary session with Joan Roca, in which the essence and value of creative excellence were made tangible through some mind-blowing video-footage, I chose to continue the day with one of the parallel conference sessions devoted to novel ways of opening up city and university archives – with cases from Vienna (where a semantic Media-Wiki was produced), Stockholm (focusing on the marketing potential of archival/historical city projects) and Emporia State University (augmented reality apps to engage students in discovery the university archive and library collections).

All speakers illustrated with vigor and panache, that tight partnerships at the basis of a broader network (one person of the Wien-Wiki-team is sponsored by the city’s waste and sewer services!), a bit of money, a persistent attitude and a lot of conviction can go a long way. They also proved that trying to re-invent the wheel in search for highly innovative solutions, has more chances of shipwrecking a project, than a more down-to-earth, trial-and-error, step-by-step approach: different ambition, better result.

In the afternoon, I attended the session devoted to early photography, featuring not only a fascinating research project on fascist undertones in Spanish war photography, thoughts on international metadata standards from a Brazilian point of view, and 19th century image collections online, but also EuropeanaPhotography’s own Fred Truyen: filled to the final seat, the bursting conference room took in his thoughts on “All Our Yesterdays: Europeana and the Phenomenology of Photographic Experience through the Framing of Digitization”, reflecting upon intermediality, deframing/reframing and enhancing the image – from’ original’ to digital.

The 30’ discussion round closing the session was insufficient for all questions and statements from the crowd, which left me with a double conclusion: our adventures with early photography are definitely – and luckily – not over yet; and many, many enthusiasts from all over the world share our passion and fascination for this part of our cultural heritage.

 


PREFORMA presented at ICA 2014 Conference in Girona

WP_20141013_010The 2nd Annual Conference of the International Council on Archives, hosted and organised by Girona City Council, through its Municipal Archive, was a great success with almost 1000 registered participants.

 

PREFORMA was presented to the attendees in one of the parallel sessions in the afternoon of Monday 13th of October by Antonella Fresa, Technical Coordinator, and Peter Pharow, Responsible of the first design phase.

 

WP_20141013_001In the morning of the same day, the PREFORMA partners took the opportunity to meet together to analyse the results of the evaluation of the bids that have been submitted and to plan the next steps, in the light of finalising the negotiation of the contracts with the awarded suppliers by the end of the month.

 

Download the presentations of PREFORMA at the ICA Conference: general presentation (Antonella Fresa), technical presentation (Peter Pharow).

Download the abstract of the PREFORMA paper here.

View all papers at http://www.girona.cat/web/ica2014/eng/comunicacions.php.


PREFORMA at SUCCEED interoperability workshop

People Turning in Gears - SynergyBert Lemmens from PACKED represented PREFORMA at the Interoperability Workshop organised by the SUCCEED project to discuss best practices and possibilities for cooperation on a technical level between European Centres of Competence and Digital infrastructures.

The aim of the workshop was to discuss best practices and possibilities for alignment and cooperation on a technical level between European Centres of Competence and Digital infrastructures.

Each of the invited attendees presented their experience with interoperability.

 

Download here the PREFORMA presentation.


Europeana Space plenary meeting, 15th October 2014

The plenary meeting of the project took place at the beautiful location of Ca’ Foscari University, one day ahead the Opening Conference of Europeana Space. After the welcome speeches by Sarah Whatley (Project Coordinator) and Leonardo Buzzavo (representing the hosting partner Ca’ Foscari), the project manager Tim Hammerton (in the photo below) and the technical coordinator Antonella Fresa illustrated the main activities carried on so far, and anticipated about the next steps for the progress of the project.

venice plenary

Then the discussion became very lively about the 6 themed pilots (Dance, Photography, Games, Open & Hybrid Publishing, Europeana TV, Museums) and their digital content, to be re-used within the Content Space developed by the project for experimenting with new applications. “Pilots are certainly the major strenght of the project” said Antonella. Coordinating and monitoring the pilots is a task for wp4 co-leaders Promoter and iMinds: Frederik Temmermans  described the monitoring methodology that will help keeping an alignement among the pilots and their interconnected activities. The discussion then went rather “technical” about the infrastructure and technical framework of the project, presented by Nasos Drosopoulos.

venice plenary2

After a lovely lunch with view on Canal Grande, the plenary got into the discussion of hackathons, monetization and incubation activities, which are intended to drive the pilots output to the real market: Gregory Markus provided a good overview of the tasks, while Christine van den Horn got the ball rolling for the hackathons that are planned for each pilot starting from Spring 2015, in different locations. A very inspiring speech by Simon Cronshaw and Peter Tullin about cultural entrepreunership made everybody very enthusiast and forward-looking to the monetization activities which will make very concrete the general aim of the project (“to unlock the business potential of digital cultural heritage”).

But Europeana Space is not composed only of the 6 pilots and related activities: some demonstrators, with educational purposes, are part of the project and their status was presented by their reponsible partners: Thodoris Chiotis for the application dedicated to the greek poet Cavafy; Ruth Montague for the Irish Folktales and Poetry demonstrator, Frederik Temmermans for the demonstrator about photographic investigantion of works of art.

An interesting and interactive moment of the plenary that involved all the participants was the debate, drove by Charlotte Waelde, reflecting upon project activity and planning related to Intellectual Property, open content and creative licenses.

Final speech by Antonella Fresa with participation of Fred Truyen was about communication & dissemination and educational training.


RICHES at the EUROPEAN WORKSHOP ON REFLECTIVE SOCIETIES

logo-ue-framebiancoThe European Commission, Directorate General for Research and Innovation, unit B6 Reflective Societies, in cooperation with the FLASH-IT project kindly organises the workshop “Bridge over troubled waters? The link between European historical heritage and the future of European integration” being held in Rome, on the 17th of October 2014.

The Horizon 2020 Research Framework Programme provides funding for research that aims “to contribute to an understanding of Europe’s intellectual basis, its history and the many European and non- European influences, as an inspiration for our lives today”. The research domain is located under the “reflective societies” part of Societal Challenge 6: Europe in a changing world – Inclusive, innovative and reflective societies.

The workshop on “reflective societies” revolves around the problematic of the interconnectedness of the past, present and the future in the current European societies.  It initiates a discussion about the potential meaning of “reflective societies” as societal challenge for current European societies in general and for setting the European research agenda under Horizon 2020 in particular.

The workshop brings together specialists of history, cultural heritage and identity studies (fields that cover a large and intimately related part of the research area under “reflective societies” as defined by the H2020 Research Framework Programme) and policy makers and managers from the European Commission and national funding bodies.

In the workshop’s afternoon session, RICHES Coordinator Prof. Neil Forbes of Coventry University will chair the Round Table on Cultural Heritage, discussing the topics and aims of the project.

flash-itThe results of the workshop will contribute to define future research topics on European history, heritage and identities that will respond to the needs of contemporary European societies and that will reinvigorate the link between interpretations of the past and the willingness to share common European objectives.

For the programme of the event and the registration, please visit this link 

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Open Knowledge Foundation joins Europeana Space

by Lieke Ploeger and Marieke Guy, Open Knowledge Foundation

OKFOpen Knowledge is a nonprofit organisation that promotes open knowledge, including open content and open data. Open Knowledge hosts over 20 working groups: domain-specific groups that focus on discussion and activity around a given area of open knowledge. OpenGLAM is an initiative run by Open Knowledge since 2012 for the promotion of open cultural content. The OpenGLAM working group is a global network of people who work to open up cultural data and content held by GLAM institutions. The OpenGLAM community provides documentation for cultural institutions wanting to open up their data and content and regularly organises events and workshops bringing together groups that are committed to building an open cultural commons.

With such great OpenGLAM credentials it seemed natural for Open Knowledge to participate in the Europeana Space project to cooperate on WP3 – The Content Space.

openglam

Open Knowledge will be providing a ‘Knowledge Base’ on ‘Open Content Exchange’ known as the ‘OpenContent Exchange Platform’ for the Content Space. This platform will comprise of collated public domain and open content materials related to the value of digital public domain and best practices around open licensing. One particular area of focus will be the monetising of Europeana open content by creative industries and the challenges this poses related to IPR.

The OpenContent Exchange Platform will help answer, in an accessible, user-friendly way, the question “What would those working in creative industries want to know or to happen to enable them to reuse Europeana content?”. Questions from those working in creative industries may include:

  • What is the license of the content? What does the license mean? What can I do with the content? Can I make money from this content?

  • Do licence rules for what I can do differ by country? Do licence rules vary for the type of content I want to use? Are there differences between the licence for physical work or a digital work?

  • How do label my own content correctly? What is rights labelling?

  • Is IPR content embedded within content? What technical standards are there around embedding IPR content?

  • How can I get legal advice on IPR issues? How can I get content cleared to reuse?

It is anticipated that results from the platform will inform further research and policy making in the cultural heritage sphere, specifically around business models for open cultural content. Any poorly covered areas in the currently available materials will be identified with the intention of ‘filling in the gaps’.

Handing over a book from the Institut für Realienkunde. This image is Public Domain marked and available on Europeana portal.

Handing over a book from the Institut für Realienkunde. This image is Public Domain marked and available on Europeana portal.

The OpenContent Exchange Platform will be an online, publicly accessible platform consisting of:

  • Links to open content to be made available through the exchange platform both from     partners of the Europeana Space project and from the wider cultural heritage community;

  • Blog posts and articles on open content being provided by Europeana Space partners     and the wider cultural heritage sphere presenting this material thematically and in a highly curated way to maximise interest in it;

  • Documentation on open licensing for both suppliers and users of open content so that     both parties fully understand the technical and legal implications of their work and make best use of its open character;

  • Materials on the re-use of openly licensed materials targeted at the creative industry, including manuals on how to source public domain works from other repositories

A first version of the OpenContent Exchange Platform will be ready in early 2015: the full version is planned for February 2016.

 

About the authors:

liekeLieke Ploeger is community manager of the OpenGLAM initiative and project co-ordinator of the DM2E project at Open Knowledge. OpenGLAM is focused on promoting free and open access to digital cultural heritage held by Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, while DM2E is building the tools and communities to enable humanities researchers to work with manuscripts in the Linked Open Web. Before joining Open Knowledge, she worked at the National Library of the Netherlands, where she was involved in several large-scale European research projects, such as IMPACT in the area of digitisation and SCAPE in the field of digital preservation.

mariekeMarieke Guy is a project co-ordinator at Open Knowledge. She is just completing work on the LinkedUp Project through which she supported a series of competitions aiming to get people to reuse open and linked data relevant to education. Many of the LinkedUp Catalogue datasets have come from the GLAM community and many of the tools developed have been museum related. Prior to working for Open Knowledge she spent 13 years at the University of Bath based at UKOLN, where she worked on a variety of Cultural Heritage projects including Cultivate, Exploit and IMPACT – a mass digitisation project which aimed to improve access to historical text. Marieke is co-ordinator of the Open Education Working Group and writes a blog about Remote Working.


Pisa is approaching and…we start co-creating!

How cultural institutions can renew themselves, finding new active forms of interaction with their audiences? How can heritage professionals create the conditions for the visitors to leave the role of observers and instead be active contributors to the development of heritage? How can the consumers become producers of cultural heritage? How can cultural heritage be co-created?

RICHES is trying to answer these questions through a series of co-creation sessions: experimental activities aimed at demonstrating how the public can be creator – and so co-creator, together with the heritage professionals – as well as user of cultural contents. The outcomes of these initiatives will be presented during 5 December’s afternoon programme of the First RICHES International Conference, being held in Pisa, at the Museum of Graphics of Palazzo Lanfranchi (4-5 December 2014).

From the 27th of September to the 15th of November 2014, three co-creation sessions are being held in the Netherlands, jointly organised by the RICHES partners Waag Society (Amsterdam) and Stichting Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde (RMV, in Leiden)

On September 27, the first session took place in De Waag, Amsterdam. Waag Society hosted 15 youngsters and three employees from the Museum of World Cultures.

One question will remain central during Waag and RMV’s co-creation workshops: how can museums (in the context of a changing European society) remain relevant to today’s youth? Goal of these sessions is to design two or more “interventions” for how this group of people deals with cultural heritage. That means: what do they think is important within a museum collection? Which stories would they like to see in these collections? And what is the most suitable interactive form for relating these particular stories?

Organisers and participants will explore the different possibilities together.

Youngsters mapping ideas and visions during the first co-creation sessions by Waag Society.

Youngsters mapping ideas and visions during the first co-creation session by Waag Society.

One of the foreseen co-creation sessions, on the basis of the work carried on in 2014 by Waag Society in collaboration with the Dutch Association of Botanical Gardens, will focus on the external environment.

During this year, Waag Society and the Dutch Association of Botanical Gardens have already conducted several co-creation sessions, with both existing and potential new visitors, as part of a strategic renewal programme in which they jointly explore and design a new innovative public programme. The learnings of these co-creation sessions will be, by the way, part of the upcoming RICHES publication on “good practices and methods for co-creation”.

The 20plus gardens constitute important Dutch heritage sites, with a living collection. The central concept of the Botanical Garden (stemming from the encyclopaedic tradition of the Renaissance) that all knowledge is collectible, as well as the form of a beautiful and lush garden – often in the inner city – and the collections themselves (both “natural” and cultured species) are a representation of historic and contemporary society. The gardens are very diverse, some are academic, some are connected to large park areas, some are connected to zoos, etc. Their collections and stories are relevant in a large number of current topics (such as our relationship with our food, reconnecting to nature, circular economy, etc.), but they have a hard time to renew their audience and connect to younger and/or multicultural groups. The potential of the gardens is very well explained by this video of the BGCI (Botanical Garden Conservation International).

The co-creation sessions brought together staff from the botanic gardens, designers and developers of technological applications and members of the public (the gardens’ current audiences and targeted new audiences). The aim of these sessions was to find new ways to connect the knowledge about plants and biodiversity to the needs of diverse audiences. The session involved running six weekly design sessions focused on different topics. Participants of these sessions explored which stories from the botanic gardens are important and relevant to the public, identify who our current visitors and new target audiences are and design new storytelling methods that can be used to reach these new audiences.

In addition the participants explore what technology might be interesting and what infrastructure (in terms of collaboration and technology, national and international) is future proof. The added value of media/ICT in the context of the gardens is to open up their processes: to linked open data initiatives, opening up their collections to others, but also incorporating crowdsourced materials (“citizen science”); to creative re-use of materials (connecting to DIY and maker movements); to new locations and channels outside their own physical and geographical location.

The participants prepared for the sessions with a set activities from a “sensitizing toolkit” that makes them look at their own garden with different eyes (image 2): “where’s the hidden treasure in my garden”, “what does my public enjoy least?”, “what type of behavior does my audience have”?

image1_WAAG

Image 2

Image2_WAAG

Image 3

The first session started with each garden sharing those findings and was followed by an activity in the garden with a set of “ambiguous prototypes”, designed to let them imagine what these objects could do in their garden, just a free format explorative activity, which gets the participants in a specific mindset and also lets them get to know each other better (image 3).

Image 3

Image 4

Towards the end of the six week activities they designed a number of specific interaction scenarios and prototypes, including a Physical Storytelling tool for grandparents and grandchildren, a Talking Tree and an Urban Gardeners programme, that will be developed further (image 4).

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RICHES at EuroMed 2014

On 3 November 2014 in Limassol, Cyprus, RICHES particpated in the V International Euro-Mediterranean Conference (EuroMed 2014), held on 3-8 November.

europmed5-infoEuroMed brings together researchers, policy makers, professionals and practitioners to explore some of the more pressing issues concerning cultural heritage today. In particular, this year the conference focused on interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary research on tangible and intangible CH, on the use of cutting-edge technologies for protection, restoration, preservation, massive digitisation, documentation and presentation of the CH content.

RICHES Coordinator Neil Forbes of Coventry University (UK) presented the project, its objectives and its first outcomes within a workshop, entitled The Digitisation Age: Mass Culture is Quality Culture. Challenges for Cultural Heritage and Society. The workshop, organised by Promoter Srl, brought together various EU projects, organisations and professionals for disseminating the latest achievements of the digital cultural heritage sector and providing an analysis about the impact of digital cultural heritage on the European society at large. The workshop’s themes are contained in a paper, entitled as the workshop and submitted to the conference Committee, presenting RICHES as one of the most important projects currently active in the digital cultural heritage domain.

 

Download the Workshop Programme

For more information visit the Conference website

 

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