Insights from CultureLabs meeting in Helsinki

Plenary Meeting in Helsinki, 5-6 Nov

In November the Plenary Meeting of the CultureLabs consortium gathered representatives of all the partners together in Helsinki to go over the progress and polish the details of the future plans of the project. The topics of the meeting held at the premises of the Finnish Heritage Agency ranged from the structure and suggested wireframes of the recipe creator and search functions of the CultureLabs platform to possible ways of promoting and establishing new collaborations with other projects and stakeholders.

During the meeting, the consortium members reached a general agreement on some of the main wireframes related to important functionalities of the CultureLabs platform, the metadata describing the published resources, and the types of search filters to be used for searching for past and ongoing participatory activities (recipes), cultural resources (ingredients), etc. The outcomes of the meeting will inform the implementation of an initial architecture and prototype of the CultureLabs platform that is currently under development.

The partners also explored the social and historical contexts of migration in Europe and their socio-cultural implications in today’s societies. Ideas were shared on how to communicate about these issues by integrating them with the activities and objectives of the CultureLabs project. One of the central topics were the surveys that will be started soon covering institutions of various sectors as well as communities with migrant background in order to find out about their experiences of participatory projects and their needs.

The Plenary Meeting was concluded with a guided tour in the inspiring exhibition Story of Finland at the National Museum of Finland (https://www.kansallismuseo.fi/en/exhibitions/suomen-tarina), which represents a new innovative way to build and curate a museum exhibition and provided great example of how digital technology can be used to add layers to the stories of an exhibition.

The meeting provided the consortium with useful feedback from each other and fresh, collaboratively cooked ideas to continue the work with.