Culture4EU

The problem your project solves

The lockdown du to the COVID-19 crisis, is making difficult for people to access physically to culture. In order to solve that, many museums and opera houses have made their artworks available online from their websites, but sometimes only for a short time (one week, or only live) so you can easily miss it. However, accessibility or information on these initiatives was disparate, without being able to find all the similar facilities. Other cultural fields were certainly available, but which ones? It is also harder to find resources from other european countries and connect with people from a foreign country.

The solution you bring to the table

We decided to make a platform (like Netflix) for culture. This platform will gather all the cultural facilities put online to access different cultural fields. They will be reachable via a search by category or by location on a map. Visitors will be able to communicate with each other via an internal messaging system. This means of communication will allow a networking according to their cultural interests so that visitors can then go to events or visits together, or to allow them to comment live on virtual tours or plays for instance. The users of the platform can also contribute to the referencing of the resources by submitting them. This will not only increase their access to culture, but also enable them to meet new people and develop social links during and after containment.

What you have done during the weekend

We worked on researching categories, then content in each categories to put on the platform in order to have a wide range of cultural activities to offer to users. We made a prototype of our platform with different functionalities. Moreover, we thought about the marketing aspect and the future development of the platform with the possibility of creating an application for smartphones.

The solution’s impact to the crisis

This gives people the opportunity to discover new forms of culture and art, which they would probably never have imagined if it wasn't centralized on the platform. It also allows isolated people to get out of their isolation through messaging and allows them to make new encounters based on their interests or on surprising common discoveries.

The necessities in order to continue the project

Giving life to the project by having a regular and important number of users. We need to develop our image on social networks according to the target audience:

LinkedIn for cultural professionals and partners
Facebook to associate user accounts
Instagram to reach a young audience
Twitter for platform news and institutions

A contact with Europeana must be made in order to have immediate access between our platform and them. It’s necessary to continue the search for content to put on the platform. Once lockdown over, the transition to actual visits to cultural sites will need to be developed, possibly with promotional offers at certain cultural sites. The creation of an app would seem necessary once the platform has been stabilized.

The value of your solution(s) after the crisis

Once the crisis of COVID-19 is over, our platform will still be able to exist to help Europeans to discover different shows or art forms. Moreover, once the lockdown is over, users will be able to plan trips to visit cultural sites in countries they don’t know and they will be able to do so with users they have met through the platform. This would allow temporary artist exhibitions to continue after the end of the actual exhibition.