Unit 5: A concrete example of an open innovation initiative for cultural heritage in times of crisis

New technologies, digital tools and open innovation have enhanced humanity’s ability to better monitor, protect and preserve cultural heritage during times of crisis and in the post-crisis era. The learning value of this unit lies in its detailed outline of the steps for an OI project that allows individuals and teams to use this knowledge and customise it in their specific context. All steps of the process are presented, from ideation, to design, implementation and assessment, giving the opportunity for anyone to get practical information about the various stages and the implications in terms of effort. The unit adopts the European Commission’s definition of OI:

“Open Innovation is to open up the innovation process to all active players so that knowledge can circulate more freely and be transformed into products and services…” (European Commission, 2016).

Among the various forms and expressions of OI, this unit focuses on a hackathon challenge that aims to combine OI with cultural heritage protection and preservation.

Unit 5 contains the following seven sections. Firstly, there is an introduction to the context of hackathons for cultural heritage, and then the EUSpace4Ukraine hackathon is presented. The next four sections deal with a description of teamwork based on a design framework for hackathons that goes from the outline of the strategy to the preparation and creation stage of a hackathon. Finally, the last section deals with the results of the teamwork, following a three-stage methodology for a successful citizen engagement process in hackathons.

5.1 Hackathons for cultural heritage

Although cultural heritage is a fundamental element of the history, tradition and cultural identity of a human community, there are fewer examples of hackathons related to Humanities and cultural heritage topics than examples focusing on business and information technologies. In most cases, narrow thinking over hackathons prevails and depicts them as brief events that comprise highly skilled and professional people coming together to resolve or produce sophisticated prototypes for mainly science and business-related issues. On the contrary, what hackathons have shown is that they can serve nearly all humanity’s pressing issues, from science, to logistics, to education and cultural heritage.

Undoubtedly, hackathons can bring true added value to the cultural sector as well by gathering creative minds, skilful individuals and the power of collective action towards the development of new solutions, ideas and practices. Whether a hackathon challenge leads to institutional change or capacity building, or it contributes to the expansion of an existing concept, the benefits it can bring to society are numerous and touch multiple frontiers. Nevertheless, hackathons dedicated to cultural heritage topics are still few in number.

Similarly, open innovation is a less common theme when it comes to CH as has been demonstrated in the O1 publication by the eCHOIng project. A search in hackathon portals is indicative of the situation as well.

In particular, in July 2022, we conducted a desktop search among big hackathon portals such as Taikai, Ultrahack, Devpost, and Hackathon. This research has brought to the fore that social and humanitarian topics were largely in the minority of topics offered by hackathon organisers. Thus, by taking the example of hackathons, it is evident that the open innovation dimension of cultural heritage is still rather underexplored.

In the coming section, an innovative Challenge for cultural heritage is presented. This Challenge was part of a hackathon for humanitarian aid that was run between June 29-July 1 2022 under the title EUSpace4Ukraine hackathon.

5.2 The #EUSpace4Ukraine initiative

When people think of space, and especially space data, their use in a humanitarian context may not be the first thing one thinks of. The hackathon “EUSpace4Ukraine” is exactly about this combination!

Specifically, the European Union Agency for the Space Programme (EUSPA) provides space-related services to business and interested stakeholders in general. With the outbreak of the Ukrainian war, EUSPA initiated a hackathon with the aim of mobilising the EU Space innovation community, so that it could provide technological solutions to enhance humanitarian support for the Ukrainian people.

During the EUSpace4Ukraine hackathon, five categories of hackathon themes were introduced:

• Unmanned solution for transport and delivery of goods

• Safety and rescue

• Integration in a new country

• Applications to help understanding and inventorying the damage in Ukraine territories

• Safe, timely and accurate Navigation for Population migration

Introduction to the hackathon

The #EUSpace4Ukraine initiative is a significant example of how the EU Space innovation community can actively engage in humanitarian support in times of crisis with the direct involvement of innovators and humanitarian organisations, as well as individuals coming from all across Europe. Besides, open innovation cannot flourish in an extremely specialised environment in which new ideas and interactions with the social world do not take place, especially regarding humanitarian support.

In this context, humanitarian support goes beyond satisfying the primary needs and provisions necessary to safeguard civilians, as it also includes various components of a community’s life trajectory, such as safe navigation to new territories or preservation of a community’s cultural patrimony. The EUSpace4Ukraine hackathon combined open innovation with the needs of a community with the aim of developing new ideas and solutions to the crisis.

EUSpace4Ukraine webinar

To communicate the launch of the initiative and spread the call for the upcoming hackathon event, EUSPA organised a webinar on April 12 (information). The main aim of the event was to engage in a fruitful exchange with partners who provided technological solutions with NGOs/Helpers who enhance humanitarian support for the Ukrainian people. At the event, a range of existing applications were showcased, from supporting NGOs delivering medical goods via drones to practical solutions to supporting the integration of those fleeing the war into EU countries.

The video of the information session is available here

As a result, groups were invited to submit topic-relevant solutions (in the form of Challenges) to the organisers who then selected the best Challenges to compete.

5.3 Design principles and their application to a hackathon challenge

Setting up a hackathon for the benefit of cultural heritage and its people requires a multitude of skills as well as interested parties that would like to contribute actively in it. As hackathon participants are people who voluntarily dedicate valuable time from their busy lives without being paid to do so, the value of their action and their commitment to successfully completing the challenge should be seen as a great example of citizen engagement. Furthermore, hackathons foster a sense of initiative in people, leading to more bottom-up and citizen-led actions, while bringing open innovation to the forefront of collective efforts aimed at providing innovative solutions in pressing societal problems.

We adopted design principles to run our hackathon Challenge to better frame our action. Therefore, in this section we detail the design principles adopted, how they have been put into practice and the outcomes achieved.

Two design frameworks will be used, namely the 2022 report “Valorising research through citizens’ engagement”, and the 2017 Guide “Hacking culture: how to guide for hackathons in the cultural sector”.

Among several other design frameworks for hackathons, these two publications have been used for their relevance to the cultural sector (the former) and their emphasis on citizen engagement (the latter).

The former serves to outline the strategy and the steps necessary in order to successfully navigate a hackathon for the cultural sector or a cultural theme, such as the Challenge we submitted to the EUSpace4Ukraine hackathon.

The latter aims to identify the three stages that are deemed essential to ensure bottom-up and citizen engagement practices in a hackathon Challenge.

5.4 Step 1: Strategy

In Hacking Culture, the authors set strategy as the first important step for identifying the basic elements of a hackathon and better understanding and contextualising. It is also presented as a way that greatly helps participants think about the work they do. According to the Hacking Culture publication, when building a strategy around a hackathon, there are certain indispensable questions members of the team must raise that will lead to the final outline of their strategy. Those questions focus on why, what and who will be the target audience of the hackathon; they also address the incentives dimension of the stakeholders as well as issues related to the hackathon programme, media and communication, the space and time in which the hackathon will take place and lastly, a reality check to ensure that everything is based on feasible objectives and means for achieving the goals.

In our context, the strategy is described below.

A. Why?

The first thing we did before developing the idea for our challenge was to ask ourselves why we should submit a Challenge on Ukrainian cultural heritage under threat. In fact, Ukrainian cultural heritage has been a topic of interest that we have been working on since the outbreak of the war. More precisely, on May 30 2022, we (Katerina Zourou and Stefania Oikonomou) released a position paper on “Resilience and action-taking: a vision of crowd-initiatives for cultural heritage preservation in an armed conflict” in which we highlighted the need for urgent action to save cultural assets and sights during conflict, taking the Ukrainian experience as a valuable case study. Moreover, on June 10, we organised a webinar on “Cultural heritage threats and the role of citizen engagement inside and outside universities” in which we hosted a panel of cultural heritage experts and researchers who shared their experiences and insights on cultural heritage protection and preservation in Ukraine.

In this context, the idea to run a hackathon Challenge for Ukrainian cultural heritage was born during the EUSPA webinar on April 12, 2022. Nevertheless, developing a hackathon Challenge for Cultural heritage under threat is not a one-person task. We (Katerina Zourou and Stefania Oikonomou) organised a session to discuss why a hackathon Challenge on this topic should be developed and who would be the target audience.

B. What?

A hackathon Challenge cannot be fully developed and elaborated without valuable input and feedback from a multitude of resources and people who are directly engaged in this issue. In the case of the cultural heritage under threat Challenge, we sought to create a pool of resources as well as generate insightful online discussions that would give us a clearer picture of what is missing and that would be extremely useful to develop and support cultural heritage protection and preservation.

The first activity we carried out was the collection of open innovation initiatives undertaken by cultural heritage institutions, universities and individuals in Ukraine and abroad to safeguard Ukrainian cultural patrimony. Having identified the most relevant resources, we released the resources as an open access collection on padlet, available here.

In the meantime, we engaged in informal online discussions with people working either in the cultural sector in Ukraine or researchers in Europe carrying out support activities. We set communication channels with them on social media, mainly through Twitter, Linkedin and email exchange. In this way, we were able to know and understand from a closer angle the efforts already deployed to safeguard Ukrainian cultural heritage, while we also got direct information from people who were behind some of the most important initiatives we learned about as we were creating our collection of resources.

Finally, the May position paper and the June webinar further shaped our Challenge idea and provided a platform where new and insightful considerations and conclusions were made.

C. Who?

To communicate our Challenge idea, and recruit possible team members who would be actively engaged in the Challenge, we start narrowing down and defining our desirable target audience. After the April 12 webinar organised by EUSPA, we concluded that our target audience would be people working in the cultural sector in Ukraine and abroad, as well as people that are part of the citizen science community, of the earth observation community, and also engaged citizens who are already involved in Ukrainian cultural heritage protection and preservation efforts.

We then started contacting European and Ukrainian institutions to communicate our work in the field so far and invite them to the June webinar, while widely communicating our participation in the EUSPace4Ukraine hackathon on social media, mainly Twitter, LinkedIn and Web2Learn’s official website. Our communication strategy was indeed crucial for attracting the interest of people who are experts or simply engaged in this topic, thus allowing us to identify the most suitable candidates for our hackathon challenge team. Finally, we made sure that we had a registration list of all participants at the June 10 webinar and sent them a post-event survey to better assess the impact of our event.

D. Stakeholders and incentives

A hackathon Challenge will only work the way it is supposed to with a constellation of diverse skills and professional experience. In the case of our Challenge, a group of individuals and communities from a variety of scientific fields and professional backgrounds made the hackathon Challenge happen. In particular, whether through direct engagement during the hackathon or with valuable input and insights at the development stage of the hackathon Challenge, expertise was used from:

• Cultural heritage organisations, like Europeana, NEMO and the Conflict and Environment Observatory,

• Open innovation experts and communities, such as Ultrahack and Dr Isber Sabrine,

• Earth Observations specialists, like Bente Lilja Bye and the Global Geodetic Observing System (GGOS) as well as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) scholar community, and

• Open data resources, like SaveEcoBot and Ecodozor

5.5 Submitting a Challenge related to cultural heritage under threat

As we had concluded that cultural heritage in Ukraine was under threat due to the conflict, we decided to submit a Challenge exactly on this topic. The moment we realised the innovativeness of combining earth observation and space data to support cultural heritage protection and preservation, our decision to go for this Challenge idea was made.

Groups were invited to submit ideas (in the form of Challenges) to the organisers who then selected the Challenges that would compete.

To communicate the launch of the initiative and disseminate the call for the upcoming hackathon event, EUSPA organised a webinar on the 12th of April (information).

In this special hackathon, Web2Learn submitted one hackathon challenge in the context of the EU funded HEIDI project. This Challenge was about Cultural Heritage under threat and sought to help protect Ukrainian cultural heritage through citizen monitoring and earth observations that would gather useful information on the state of cultural monuments and assets on the ground.

You can find more on the Challenge here.

5.6 Preparation & skills
 

Developing an inspiring and successful hackathon Challenge cannot be done without a clear strategy and preparation, so it is vital to identify and involve the right people and communities.

Step 2: Preparation