Dipartimento di Studi Storici

Descrizione del progetto

iCommunity will develop an application for community engagement and awarness.

The main goal of this application is to find a universal method for inclusive societies in decision-making processes for cultural heritage management. The idea is to encourage different stakeholders, such as local people living in or around the museums and cultural heritage sites, to take active roles in decision-making processes related to management and conservation. Furthermore, this mobile application will provide sufficient information and clear data for direct and indirect education of users by holding different workshops.

Data shown in the application will also help people to understand the reasons behind the implementation of planned activities by taking part in comments and talking with experts or professionals. In addition, it also aims to make the decision-making process clearer and more transparent by presenting voting functions and showing all comments for users. Finally, the application outcomes (which include analysed data collected by feedback, voting, communication, etc.) will help to understand the real needs and interests of different stakeholders in cultural heritage sites and museums.

The engaged stakeholders in a given cultural heritage site are divided into three main categories; community of place, community of interest and community of practice. In each category, the stakeholders are:
• Community of place, namely local people living in the core zone, buffer zone and other urban areas as public;
• Community of interest, namely local cultural heritage NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisation), media, private sectors;
• Community of practice, namely Cultural Heritage Research Institutions, Municipality, experts, Governmental Cultural Heritage Organization and Administration of World Heritage
Protection.

These three main stakeholders can be divided into two main categories, internal and external: internal stakeholders are those people susceptible to direct effect by a decision; external stakeholders are those indirectly involved with the cultural heritage site. Internal stakeholders are living within (or by) the site, external stakeholders are engaged in coordination, funding,
resourcing and publication of the issues related to related heritage sites. The iCommunity application will be designed to fulfil goals and needs of all the above stakeholders.

iCommunity is going to be designed as a smartphone application for facilitating the interaction between cultural heritage authorities and users so as to stimulate public participation and engagement in cultural heritage management. Through the application, ongoing and future activities will be published by institutions, then the users can discuss posted activities in the form of comments and talks to an expert. They can also vote for scheduled or posted activities.

Based on users’ location, comments and voting, the authorities will be able to assess the users’ behaviour for taking it into consideration in their decision-making process. The application will be able to extract all information related to museums, cultural heritage conservation and management from social media (e.g. Instagram, Facebook) and websites (e.g. ICOMOS, ICCROM, WHC, etc.) by APIs. This feature will show collective data about cultural heritage activities for the iCommunity users.

This application, which is under prototyping, will provide various ways of login by using social network accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Google, etc.) or by direct registration on the application itself. There will be two types of accounts: (1) institutional accounts (profiles for decision-makers in e.g. cultural heritage sites and museums) and (2) personal accounts (public participants who are affected by a decision) with different functionality. Institutions will work as a local admin to operate their profile by posting the activities, holding workshops, creating sub-profiles for their experts and using analysed data. They could also tag useful workshops posted by other institutions for their members (e.g. e-learning programs).
Almost all cultural heritage sites and museums will have some training courses for various audiences in different topics and formats.

This part of the iCommunity application can be used as on- or off-line e-learning and workshops for users. Since some workshops and e-learning programs are the same, the application will classify them in a group. The institutions will be able to tag the similar
workshops and e-learning programs to their profiles for avoiding repetition. This feature will not only improve the quality of training courses, but it also decreases the cost of production for institutions. In addition, this ability will make the workshops and e-learning programs available to larger audiences.

Risultati e pubblicazioni

Nasrolahi, A., Gena, C., Messina, V., Ejraei, S. 2021, "Participatory Monitoring in Cultural Heritage Conservation: Case Study: The Landscape zone of the Bisotun World Heritage Site", in UMAP 2021 - Adjunct Publication of the 29th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3450614.3463390

Nasrolahi, A. Messina, V., Gena, C., 2020, “Public Participation in Museums and Cultural Heritage Sites: iCommunity Mobile Application”, in A. Antoniou, B. De Carolis, A. J. Dix, C. Gena, T. Kuflik, G. Lepouras, A. Origlia, G. E. Raptis: (eds), Proceedings of the AVI²CH Workshop on Advanced Visual Interfaces and Interactions in Cultural Heritage co-located with 2020 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI 2020), Island of Ischia, Italy, September 29, 2020 http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2687/paper8.pdf

Documentazione

• paper8.pdf (1.1 MB)

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• 3450614.3463390.pdf (0.6 MB)

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