CC Community-Driven Heritage Initiatives
Working Group:

Throughout 2022, this Creative Commons Working Group (CC WG) is discussing how and why Community-Driven Heritage Initiatives are of interest to the CC, the GLAM community and beyond. As part of our research, we are releasing a survey to collect cases of digital community heritage initiatives and open source software/tools. We will categorize these digital projects and tools, identify best practices and common problems, and publish our insights in open-access. Our end project will be a report released on the CC platform and a public webinar. We welcome your participation in any aspect of our group.

Join Us

The Community-Driven Heritage Initiatives Working Group is part of the CC Open GLAM Program. Our group is comprised of an international team of archivists, librarians, scholars/researchers, and cultural heritage/open culture enthusiasts who have a common goal to research digital community heritage initiatives. Please get involved in any of the following ways:

• Subscribe to the OpenGLAM mailing list to receive regular updates;

• Follow us on social media via Twitter and the Open GLAM Medium platform, where we’ll also announce new releases and updates;

• Reach out directly via email at: info[at]openglam.org to join our next meeting: we meet on the last Thursday of every month at 15:00 CET.

Defining the concept

In the context of the Creative Commons Open GLAM Working Group “Community-driven heritage initiatives”, a collaborative working definition of the term has been proposed:

Community-driven heritage initiatives are defined as collective projects where community members meaningfully contribute to a heritage-related common cause which promotes the interests of the community and/or the greater public.

In order to better map the spectrum of community-driven heritage initiatives, from bottom up grassroots actions to top down institutional involvement, a working typology of three categories is being used:

Community-driven projects can be initiated by members of a community and exist entirely outside an institution, or they can actively involve GLAM organizations. Communities might initiate a project which may (or may not) become a joint partnership (a co-creation) between community members and an institution.

Community-fueled projects are when communities of practice may be sought out by a GLAM institution (who initiates the project) to actively participate; this participation could play out at different levels, such as contributing heritage-related materials to the institution(s), collaborating, and jointly or wholly curate their display, representation and interpretation.

Community-oriented projects can be initiated and mediated by institutions who orient their cultural heritage materials around particular community interests and perhaps plan community events around these projects or involve community-based heritage knowledge.

Acknowledging that the term “community” is fluid, multifaceted and even disputed, we use the term broadly and inclusively based on the community members’ self-recognition and our evolving understandings. Community-driven heritage initiatives are moving towards more sustainable and responsible models of participatory cultural data governance and openness, with the collaboration between communities, the public, GLAMs and other interested institutions. By encouraging multiple participants, these cultural heritage initiatives intrinsically yield diverse perspectives while practising cultural data mindfulness.

Current WG members (in alphabetical order):

Alhassan Mohammed Awal, Communications, Outreach and Campaigns Director for (and a Co-founder of) Dagbani Wikimedians User Group. He has contributed to the organization and leadership of many Dagbani Wikipedia projects; has served in the jury team as well as a lead coordinator for many of the Wiki Loves projects (which involve the collection and uploading of heritage materials to the CC) for the Dagbani Wikimedians User Group. He has also volunteered on the communication team for WikiIndaba 2021 (hosted by Uganda) and is a member of Translators Without Borders, where he participates in various Wikimedia translation projects from English into Dagbani.

Marie-Claire Dangerfield, advisor to the Rotterdam City Archives where she (together with a city heritage partner) developed a practice for heritage co-creation  which was selected for a  Cultural heritage in action best practice (report is here); this practice has been repeated with some success in other Dutch projects. She is currently working on a co-creation oral history project with Erasmus University and city partners.

Patricia Diaz-Rubio, a Chilean social communicator and open knowledge and open culture enthusiast, with a background in communications, cultural heritage studies and development studies. She is now based in Santiago, where she works for Wikimedia Chile.

Maria Drabczyk, a member of the board and head of policy and advocacy at Centrum Cyfrowe, a think-and-do tank based in Warsaw, Poland. She is a sociologist, researcher and manager of cultural projects in the field of heritage and new technologies.

Bettina Fabos (Co-Lead), professor of Interactive Digital Studies at University of Northern Iowa (U.S.), director of the Fortepan (US) archive, which is a partner to the Fortepan (Hungary) project.

Charles Ikem, co-founder of PolicyLab Africa based in Lagos, Nigeria. Charles is an open access and open data advocate, with a focus on supporting breakthrough research and policy at the nexus of technology, open policy, and humanity and in leading high-impact change projects in Africa. 

Revekka Kefalea, project manager at Inter Alia (civic, non-profit organisation in Athens, Greece), where she is mostly involved in EU-funded projects in relation to digital culture, arts, cultural heritage, active citizenship and open access.

Jacob Moe, organiser of the Syros International Film Festival and Archipelago Network, an audiovisual cultural heritage project, both based in the Cyclades, a group of islands in the Aegean Sea.

Ngozi Osuchukwu, Librarian and faculty member of the Oral History and Cultural Heritage at the Department of Library and Information Science at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Nigeria.

María R. Osuna Alarcón, Permanent Lecturer at the University of Salamanca, Spain, with research in the Department of Library Science and Documentation at the University of Salamanca: Information and Documentation Policies, Open Science and Innovation; Document Analysis, Bibliographic Heritage and Repository Management with XML.

Mariana Ziku (Co-Lead), research associate at the Intelligent Interaction Research Group, Dept. of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean (Greece), and co-founder of the Biennale of Western Balkans, promoting intangible and natural heritage through art, technology and open knowledge.

If you are interested in joining our group, contact us at info[at]openglam.org

CC BY-SA 4.0
Community-Driven Heritage Initiatives, Creative Commons Open GLAM Working Group, 2022