IGF 2025 Lightning Talk #34 Digital cooperation for sustainable heritage preservation

    Huawei European Research Institute
    Proposal of lightning talk, happy to engage other participants
    Speakers
    Martin Alvarez-Espinar, Huawei European Research Institute, Western Europe Applicable to all the regions and stakeholder types
    Onsite Moderator
    Martin Alvarez (lightning talk)
    Rapporteur
    Martin Alvarez (lightning talk)
    SDGs
    11.4


    Targets: Fully aligned to the SDG 11.4, aiming the promotion of all heritage in a feasible and realistic way, under low cost measures. Also linked to some points and indicators of SDG4 through leveraging the cultural assets for education, and involving students in the participatory actions to digitize, store and protect the heritage locally.
    Format
    Lightning talk, but also available to present in other forums/panels that could be related to the topic.
    Duration (minutes)
    20
    Description
    Cultural heritage, or heritage in general, becomes the identity of any group and community—one of the development roots to be preserved and promoted for the benefit of present and future generations. Policies leveraging collaboration, open access to information, and open toolsets may enhance heritage preservation and boost its outreach. However, not all cities and towns can afford new digital services for this purpose, or this topic is not a priority in their strategic roadmaps. This lightning talk presents 'Heritage in...', a non-commercial, ready-to-use collaborative methodology and toolset to overcome this challenge. 'Heritage in...' supports local communities worldwide, maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of the institutions and individual actions with minimum resources. This methodology is presented as a good practice for governments and associations worldwide to engage and empower citizens and local businesses in a participatory approach to enrich local knowledge in any heritage scenario globally. The session aims to offer this open project as a conceptual and practical solution to be customized for any particular heritage topic (e.g., culture, food, tourism, and nature) by any community in the world, including developing territories. This project has been tested with several real-world implementations that make the most of the public (and open-licensed) assets, public knowledge, and open-source tools. New use cases can be implemented in less than one hour, with no strong IT skills required. IEEE paper that explains the methodology: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10293430

    The idea is to present the methodology and real use cases looking for more participation, offer the tools to anyone interested.