Project Kick Off - Ready to RECHARGE the Cultural Sector?

Welcome to the RECHARGE Diary - here we will document the project by recording experiences, reflecting on activities and explaining what we do and how. All to get people as excited as we are - and hopefully involve as many more individuals and institutions as possible to RECHARGE the cultural sector.

On 17-18 October 2022 we kicked off the project in Rotterdam, at the Debatpodium Arminius, and in the months that followed a very energetic start we have been busy researching, discussing planning, and getting ready for the launch of this platform and all the participatory activities that will follow.

During the kick off, we individuated the main question the project wants to answer: How do we use participation as a driving force for CH business models for CHIs in Europe? Indeed, participation is the missing element in sustainable financing; the main challenge is capitalizing value by integrating it into different organizations.

The core tool we will use to engage communities and disseminate the results of the project is the participatory platform (where this Diary is hosted!), where subscribers can:

• Learn about the project and its different components and partners
• Get updates and news on the future activities and publications
• Read about the Living Labs, follow their work and take part in their development
• Ask questions to the team and get in touch to discuss how to take part in the project

In order to respond to our main question, we will follow this structure:

To make everything run smoothly, we have 5 Work Packages taking care of the different aspects and phases of the project:

Work Package 1 aims at providing background knowledge on innovative forms of participatory business models that can be tested by the Living Labs. This will be done through desk research, targeted literature reviews, observations of living lab interviews and surveys. 

While WP1 mostly concentrate on the analysis of the current situation of participatory practices (mainly Europe but with also some external examples) and of financial models, Work Package 2 aims at establishing Ch Living Labs, which will provide space to co-create, test and validate the RECHARGE models. This means not only working with the Living Labs established and managed by the project, but also to develop and maintain networks and offer services like workshops to be tested in other institutions.

Work Package 3 will focus on assessments. It will create sustainability indicators of the participatory organizational strategies in Cultural Heritage Institutions, assess the value of CHIs’ collection-based products and services in the market, provide a roadmap to develop pricing mechanisms & future sale services that stimulate access to collections. This will be done via surveys, focus groups, interviews and, of course, this platform.

Work Package 4 aims at translating all the research findings into practical guidelines, more specifically into The Recharge playbook: a guide to help institutions to design their own participatory models - a simple and explicit guide to help CHIs to design, develop and implement their own participatory, sustainable and innovative business models. Additionally, the work package will also create the Recharge Academy aiming at consolidating the project outcomes and training the trainer.

Last but not least, Work Package 5 and Work Package 6 will respectively focus on the engagement, dissemination and exploitation of the project, and will supervise its logistical and and on the organizational sides.

This kick off meeting was very much needed to better understand roles and dependencies - now that we are all set, we look forward to collaborating and engaging new communities and institutions to RECHARGE the cultural sector.