Culture 2.0

RunCoCo attended the Culture 2.0 festival in Warsaw to give a seminar in the Community Archives strand.

This year, the Festival theme was ‘Citizen 2.0’ and an aim was to look at citizenship in culture, explore social aspect of culture connected to technological progress and discuss how a community can get involved in creating and creative use of its own cultural resources.

The event was well attended, and participants were treated to a range of activities, from lectures and seminars to workshops, art installations and exhibitions. The Community Archives strand offered a great line-up. In the first plenary, representatives from INA (French national audiovisual institute http://www.ina.fr/ ) talked about, among other things, a great project for sharing memories. People are invited to upload their moving images – home videos and films – to an archive of shared memories. The films are viewed by INA experts and some are selected for their online exhibition. The project also offers a link to a partner who will digitize material at a discount for those wanting to contribute to the project. See http://www.ina.fr/memoires-partagees for details

Simon Tanner (Director of King’s Digital Consultancy Services at King’s College London) talked about how to measure the value of impact of digital resources and presented a report that he has written: The Balanced Value Impact Model (available at http://www.kdcs.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/impact.html).

In the afternoon, RunCoCo led a seminar on Community Collections, presenting some examples of crowdsourcing and community collection initiatives we have been involved in and discussing how they have been used to successfully create collections of value and enrich our understanding of our history and heritage. The seminar concluded with a general discussion about community collection projects and issues and opportunities these face.

The venue for the event was the Polish Audiovisual Institute (NINA) which had been completely handed over to the festival. The building is about to be refurbished shortly, and the organisers had taken this as an opportunity to allow people to express their creativity freely across the walls. Buckets of paint with brushes and rollers were available for anyone who felt thus inclined, and it was interesting to see how the walls changed over the period of the event. New impressions were added and old ones painted over. Those who did not want to splash paint on the walls could take part in the great wall weaving experiment. Hundreds of screws were inserted into the walls, and we could string yarns of all colours between them, creating a wide wall web on the stairs.

The festival offered a series of sessions in different rooms where the audience could sit on swings and see-saw benches while listening to the talks. One floor was filled with art installations and exhibitions, with a great buzz about it, and participants did not only have the opportunity to watch what others have done but could also take part in a series of hands-on activities. On the whole a very interesting and engaging event of which NINA should be proud.

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