Digital Community Heritage and Open Access
by Mariana Ziku and Bettina Fabos
Additional contributors (in alphabetical order): Alhassan Mohammed Awal, Marie-Claire Dangerfield, Maria Drabczyk, Revekka Kefalea, Jacob Moe, Ngozi Perpetua Osuchukwu, María R. Osuna Alarcón.
This multilingual report outlines the research carried out by the CC Open Culture Working Group Digital Community Heritage in the context of open access and inclusive digital transformation, highlighting three key findings:
i. Community-related heritage brings a higher awareness for responsibly acknowledging source communities when it comes to access and reuse (Vézina & Muscat, 2021).
ii. Publishing community heritage in open access can rebalance the representation gaps in the public sphere of under-reported and marginalised communities (Fraser, 2021).
iii. Community heritage initiatives may build capacity at the community level, ensuring the use of tools, policies and technologies to the best advantage of the communities (Vézina & Nicholas, 2014).
Defining community
What is our current understanding of community? A community is a fluid, broad and multi-faceted concept, bound by a i. sense of identity, ii. sense of belonging and iii. interconnections among community members (Forsyth, 2012). Τhe UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), which foregrounds communities in the heritage context, does not specify “community” permitting freedom over its definition. Communities can be self-determined, recognising their representational belonging at grassroots level, or not self-identified (historicised communities). In digital settings, communities can be enabled in more “passive” modes, through user contribution, peer-to-peer or Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Of course, communities can display overlapping factors and a complex web of relations that are often not easily identifiable (Pérez López, 2014).
Methodology
Our research focused on online initiatives where community members or users contribute to a community heritage-related common cause. We created a threefold categorisation to organise and assess the relevance of all initiatives to our topic: community-driven, community-fueled and community-oriented. We released a multilingual public survey to collect international digital community heritage cases, in addition to desktop research taken on by the working group members.
We also created a typology of 10 categories to sort the various types of digital community heritage initiatives: 1. Citizen science/ crowdsourcing, 2. Community science/ community-based participatory research (CBPR), 3. Commons-based peer production, 4. Folksonomy, 5. Joint curation, 6. Social art practice/socially engaged art, 7. Participatory data governance, 8. Digital action/activism, 9. Community archiving, and 10. Other (community) heritage models. The initiatives could fall into more than one category.
We found two overarching categories of community types with 3 subcategories each:
i. Power of place (bounding based on locality, and further categorised into city, region, and country)
ii. Power of commonality (bounding around a commonality, and further categorised into cultural, interest, and practice)
“Multiple communities” was added for initiatives that serve more than one type of community.
Openness is the focal point of our research. We included three overarching categories: i. allowing user contribution, ii. the use of open licences/ the openness to creative reuse, iii. the inclusion of open-source software or tools.
We deployed a simple grading system to assess the degree of openness. For user contribution, we categorised three types: i. Allowing for public contributions (tagging, transcribing, etc.), ii. Allowing for public upload (ability to upload original artefacts and resources), iii. Allowing for public collaborative involvement, which provides the highest agency and autonomy, based on the ladder of participation (Haklay, 2011; Arnstein, 1969). For the use of open licences, we questioned if the initiative uses open licences following the recommended conformant licences by OKF, if it is closed or open to creative reuse and, if it is open, whether it allows for liberal or limited reuse (applying restrictions such as only for educational uses). Lastly, we identified whether the initiatives use, develop or both, open-source software or other tools, including mainly stand-alone, user-friendly software that offers integrated solutions.
Analysis
We compiled the data and modelled them machine-readable, prepared research questions, and performed data analysis, exploring the data and rendering visualisations. The open-access spreadsheet containing additional attributions can be found here. We settled up analysing the following 27 initiatives:
Data visualisations
Insights
Community Engagement through place and commonality
We have found a vibrant scene of inspiring digital community heritage initiatives worldwide [Fig. 6] that demonstrate deep public engagement. Out of the 27 initiatives, 15 are oriented around place, serving a single country, region or drill down to the local history of a city or neighbourhood. Platforms like Topotheque or Fortepan.us offer communities the infrastructure to self-organise at regional, city or even village level. Historypin and Reporting Wildlife Crime allow community members to share microhistories at the extreme local level (a street corner, a forest).
We also identified 9 initiatives bound by commonality, often transgressing boundaries and supporting cross-border actions on diverse sociocultural topics such as LGBTQ2IA+, Indigenous and Balkan-wide heritage. Not surprisingly, we found a natural overlap between communities of commonality and place.
Enhancing Community Agency: working with, in-between and outside of GLAMs
Community members are building projects, joining platforms and working on bottom-up, co-creative activities, uploading their cultural artefacts, adding tags and other metadata based on their local history and community-shared knowledge. Non-GLAM initiatives, which are the majority of our selected cases (12), represent diverse and under-reported communities in creative and ethical ways. Non-GLAMs are the foundation for all community-driven initiatives in our study (5), operating as incubators of community agency at large, playing a critical role in enhancing capacity and know-how within communities.
Many of our selected digital community heritage initiatives (10) fall under the “In-between” category, which have emerged in the liminal space between GLAM institutions and community circles and can be identified as cooperative portals (Campbell & Fabos, 2021) [Fig. 2a]. They seem to lead in open innovation and are often tied to the open movement, playing a critical role in pushing the digital heritage sphere to rethink user experience and usability.
Inspiring Openness in Digital Community Heritage
The majority of initiatives most open to creative reuse are also community-fueled [Fig. 11] and tend to be oriented around citizen science/crowdsourcing, folksonomy, joint curation and community archiving [Fig. 12]. All initiatives that score high in achieving openness have started earlier in time (2009, 2010, 2011, 2015), whereas initiatives that have started more recently (2019–2022) are not extensively deployed in terms of openness [Fig. 10]. This may imply that openness is declining or that robust open digital infrastructures require time and effort. The rise of open-source software in recent years is encouraging and may be based on its benefits in combining low-cost maintenance and collaborative coding/problem-solving. However, some noteworthy initiatives adopt a more closed approach, possibly linking to the current state of openness that may underserve certain communities or to a lack of awareness (Khan, 2020). Additional solutions may be needed that enhance the safety and reliability of communities within digital settings (e.g., Local Contexts).
Digital community heritage initiatives display many innovative, sustainable and responsible models of openness, through the collaboration between communities and the public with non-GLAM initiatives, “in-between” collaborative portals and GLAMs, which are the driving forces in this vibrant contemporary scene. Our Working Group consensus is to encourage more paths for open-access and collaboration. These can come in the form of including clear open policy statements and easy paths to access open-source software. Connecting with the open movement communities can grow, translating CC content into more inclusive languages and creating open-access resource toolkits for community heritage that build upon good practices, increasing engagement among communities and enhancing their autonomy, agency and openness.
Click HERE to read the full report.
Read the report translated in:
Chinese by Lucien Cheng-hsia Lin and Rock Hung
Spanish by María R. Osuna Alarcón
Swahili by Liz Oyange - Ngando
French by Nicolas Pettiaux
Hindi by Dr Gireesh Kumar T.K.
