Will the heritage of tomorrow be financed and curated by the crowd?

On Tuesday 14th June, MoMu – Fashion Museum Province of Antwerp is hosting a workshop on crowdfunding and crowdsourcing. Addressed to cultural heritage professionals, the workshops aims to teach how to engage users to let them make contributions to cultural heritage collections through crowdfunding and co-creation.

Stany Dederen for MoMu - Fashion Museum Province of Antwerp, CC-BY-SA.

Crowdfunding and crowdsourcing are two popular practices in museum management, consisting in the involvement of large number of people in raising contributions and in obtaining informations, typically via the Internet. In 2014, more than 16 billion dollars were raised via crowdfunding worldwide.

The case study for the workshop will be MoMu’s Study Collection, which is being set up by the museum in collaboration with the University of Antwerp. This collection will offer the opportunity to initiate a new dialogue with the Museum’s users; in fact, the main aim is for the collection to be usable and reusable in all its aspects and potential. To support this main idea, the museum is also working together with Goteo Foundation to build a hybrid crowdfunding and crowdsourcing framework, in order to set up a ‘usable’ fashion museum.

The workshop will investigate the ways crowd engagement can help open standards for collaborations and how this collaboration could help design a comprehensive, educative lab context. Moreover, the session will try to define how it is possible to integrate the entire process of conception, design, prototyping and financing for the development of new projects. Will the crowd bring more social innovation to the long-term planning required to determine the future of the common cultural heritage?

The workshop is organized with the support of the Europeana Foundation. To learn more about the program, visit MoMu website. To register to the event, please visit Eventbrite.