Open up and lead the change
Think critically about power and leadership
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One of the 5 networked heritage principles
Involving participants in the co-design of activities appeared to enhance their enjoyment and sense of ownership in the activities. It is therefore recommended that the lead partners involve participants in design and planning decisions at the start of activities, both in terms of content, but also in terms of practical decisions, such as when and where activities should take place.
Evaluation of the Welsh ‘Fusion: Tackling Poverty through Culture’ programme (April, 2015)
In linking heritage and identity at the local scale, the most important contributor is the public: ‘the heritage citizen’. If we want wider participation, we need to create the tools, roles and powers through which people can contribute and discover.
Devolution, new spatial and localism powers, and in particular the new ability to list buildings of ‘assets of community value’ present significant opportunities for heritage. Digital tools and increased connectivity allow for groups to self-organise and to assume the power to act; rather than relying on powers being lobbied for and roles ‘given’. However, the potential of the digital age to connect different local areas in a learning network is far from being fully realised. The focus of our advocacy is therefore on the emerging digital networks and their application in heritage.
Institutions such as the UK-wide Association of Independent Museums, Scottish Civic Voice, or the Arts Council England, support strong heritage networks, deliver accreditation schemes and provide support, but few of these types of organisations have invested in data-driven approaches.
It is through common platforms for accessing and sharing information that we expect networked heritage to accelerate the most impactful ways of linking heritage and identity in place. Within that proposition, accessibility of tools must be prioritised as a fundamental design characteristic. It cannot be presumed that the growth of open data and crowdfunding will automatically solve issues of inclusion and diversity, making heritage more democratic, utilitarian or meritocratic. The introduction of new information and new networking platforms can actually add to the risk of exclusion and inequality of access.
Recent guidance from Locality notes that in relation to community consultation on neighbourhood planning, it is often taken for granted that people can read and write, can be contacted at an address, can easily leave their home, have time to do so, speak the same language and have the confidence to speak.
The way in which roles are structured, however inadvertently and unintentionally, might reinforce the social gradient of participation. Communities do not have equal capacity to process, harness and utilise information, nor do they have equal social and financial potential in their access to the social networks which underpin the value of crowdfunding approaches.
The benefits of public participation in management are well-established, but we tend to rely on traditional qualitative contributions, neglecting the complementary role quantitative methods could make. It’s not only necessary to inspire the contributions of the public en masse; data is becoming increasingly important and needs to be managed well.
Many aspects of the heritage sector, especially those which are professionalised, lent themselves well to being early adopters of database technologies, with abundant skills in categorising, classifying, and recording were abundant. Unfortunately, in some cases these organisations find themselves victims of ‘first mover disadvantage’. As one academic in the heritage sector told us:
“Data is often dumped without thinking about the knowledge management implications: its condition, or the possibilities for its use. Few large scale organisations have a knowledge management skills set.”
The value of open data is widely recognised, including by central government, who announced investment in a new open postcode address register in the 2016 budget. Similarly, the benefit of integrated knowledge management systems is widely acknowledged, as demonstrated by the announcement of a consolidation of Historic Environment Records in the Culture White Paper. But integrated data reporting systems are not in place for the network of citizens and activists taking forward new localism powers. To generate the richest data in the public interest means involving the public to discover insights for themselves and contribute to the richness of data.
Heritage can not only generate data, but can channel it. With the strength of the UK’s heritage volunteer workforce at 500,000, digital platforms present the opportunity to engage the public in creating a richer public record of the heritage of the UK. The beginnings of this movement are many: a pilot in Wiltshire to process archive material through volunteering in the community; The National Archives has a programme of Citizen Historian volunteering; Historypin has 60,000 user-generated entries for the UK, with the potential wealth of local engagement demonstrated through a successful partnership with Reading Museum; Finds.org has over 1.2m archaeological items reported from across the UK since it started in 1997. Historic England is taking the pioneering move of opening up the National Heritage List to public contributions, attracting 6,000 contributions in the first two months. New technologies include the ability to use public photography to build 3D models (as Cadw and partners have done in Anglesey) and analysing the trail of data that people leave as they explore the historic environment.
A crucial consideration for heritage organisations will be how to develop the opportunities of the digital age without neglecting the physical and material assets which have defined the organisation in the past. As much as digital tools create new opportunities to interact with heritage, especially for young people, as noted above, they can exclude others. According to one critic: “a great tranche of museums are pursuing digital strategy blindly”. As “digital connectivity homogenises at many levels”, many heritage organisations are stewards for particularly special physical objects. In an age when digital connectivity is ubiquitous, their tactility therefore remains, and increasingly becomes, their source of advantage.
In practice:
Empower
Encourage take-up of existing powers such as the Community Right to Bid, listing heritage sites as Assets of Community Value. Explore new models that have been piloted (for example in Rethinking Parks) and invest in leadership capacity of community organisations with heritage responsibilities (as Empowering Design Practices has done with historic places of worship). Central government should review whether there are any national statutory powers, relevant to heritage, which would benefit from being part of discussion with local authorities as part of devolution deals.
Participate
Invite the public to contribute to heritage records, learning from Bristol’s Know Your Place tool — and through projects such as Wiltshire Archives has done with local care homes. Create new roles for the public to shape the historic environment of the future — as 42nd Street have done for young people as part of their Horsfall project in Manchester. Run public competitions, as they have done in Dundee, to create a shortlist of future street names and building names.
Open up
Transfer heritage assets to community management, as Lambeth Council are doing at Streatham Common, use infrastructure to host next-generation tech projects, as Bristol Council have lent their lampposts to Bristol is Open, and open up data and learning resources, including universities. New York University has put this into practice in New York’s ‘prison for the dead’. The government should consider directing public sector data owners to publish data openly; Land Registry data was identified as a priority for many of the stakeholders we engaged.
