Engagement Strategy

Last winter the OpenHeritage partners came together to collaborative write a manifesto that captured the motivations, organizational ethics, and values that move the project forward. 

Using the title of the project OpenHeritage: Organizing, Promoting and Enabling HEritage Reuse through Inclusion, Technology, Access, Governance and Empowerment partners together defined each term bringing together their individual contexts and values and bridging them with the wider project. 

Throughout the collaboration OH made use of the different features of the Decidim platform, to both experiment and model how create, and collaborative communities can come together online. For example, from the start the collaboration used the sortition feature to randomly assign a partner and a back up partner to each term to ensure that no biases were use and to distribute the work as fairly as possible. Then to write the text the participatory text writing feature was used so that each partner could amend the terms as needed. During this process partners could also give comments and supports for different amendments. To learn more about these features check out our help section on OpenHeritage. 

The endeavor took close attention and care. For instance, many of these features such as sorittion and the participatory text were new to users. So in addition to creating this activity, many emails and new manuals were produced to support user access. However, in the end each partner was able to bring their own flavor and ideas to the table. 

Here we would like to highlight our partner from KU Leuven:

‘Empowerment takes close attention and lots of effort. Agency among citizens and communities, awareness of their heritage values, and support in of becoming integral actors of spatial change – is the most powerful when fueled by local dynamics, initiatives, needs and engagement. Connectivity and alignment with other actors in spatial change is crucial, but empowerment starts from within communities, and is strongest when it is and remains self-driven.’

The aspiration of OH is to cultivate self driven motivation within local communities not just to generate heritage reuse, but to also integrate accountable and transparent methods and practices. Hopefully, creating tools and awareness through manifesto pushes this endeavor forward. 

Especially, with the emergence of Covid-19, it has become more important for our labs to reflect on these values and use our online tools like those on the platform to reimagine how we connect, create resilience, and build community. The current situation has without a doubt presented immense challenges, not only with our ability to meet but also in terms of the health and safety of our team and the residents with whom our labs work. As we move forward, the manifesto serves as an important benchmark to understand our journey and create a compass to navigate these uncertain times.