Building sustainability and informing policy: The MicroPasts programme of knowledge exchange

This Follow-on project will build on the successful results achieved by the original MicroPasts project ('Crowd- and Community-Fuelled Archaeological Research') and will take them forward via two linked programmes of knowledge exchange that will have a transformative and long-lasting impact on heritage policy and practice, as well as on MicroPasts developers and contributors. MicroPasts initially received funding under the AHRC call for Digital Transformations in Community Research Co-Production in the Arts and Humanities and, over its 18 month duration (1 October 2013-31 March 2015), the team have developed, implemented and started to evaluate a novel model to support collaborative research in archaeology, history and heritage that draws on a combination of crowd-sourcing, co-design and crowd-funding.

We now propose to undertake knowledge exchanges and further evaluation with two aims: (1) to study and enable a community-led model of platform and project management that is sustainable in the longer-term, and (2) to inform heritage policy and practice in the UK, and guide investments in participatory projects that use crowd-sourcing and/or crowd-funding. With those aims in mind, we plan to engage interested MicroPasts contributors in discussions about how they might take responsibility for the day-to-day running of the MicroPasts websites, and then develop the technical resources, guidelines and skills that are necessary for a community-led model of platform and project management to become fully operational. With policy-makers, analysts and practitioners in the heritage sector, we wish to review the methods and results of the evaluation conducted over the lifetime of MicroPasts so far, to steer further reflection and develop knowledge about the benefits generated by the use of crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding, for individuals, communities and heritage, and about how best to capture these benefits.

We will respond to MicroPasts contributors' stated desire to take forward the work conducted until now and help maintain the digital resources created in the lifetime of MicroPasts, so that they can continue using and benefiting from them. In addition, the knowledge exchange programme with volunteers will offer both contributors and current core staff meaningful learning opportunities, which can also be important for employment and career development purposes. Beyond significantly strengthening the co-creative nature of MicroPasts, we expect that this model of community-led management could potentially provide an exemplar for the longer-term sustainability of other web-based participatory projects that use crowd-sourcing or crowd-funding. This knowledge exchange programme will produce tutorials and guidelines that will be made available open access for anyone to download and re-use.

Furthermore, knowledge exchange among heritage policy-makers and practitioners will bridge a substantial knowledge gap about the ways in which more participatory and digitally interactive cooperation with the public can support heritage organisations in re-designing and improving their services in the context of economic downturn. In addition, the project will help heritage institutions and funding bodies to face the numerous technical, ethical and methodological challenges of evaluating community- and crowd-fuelled projects. This strand of the knowledge exchange programme will be conducted via workshop discussions, followed by the write up of a summary paper and evaluation guidelines, together with a full report on the MicroPasts evaluation. These resources will be made available online, but also circulated directly amongst the extensive network of heritage professionals with whom the project staff and their proposed collaborators are in contact.

The Follow-on project will have compelling outcomes and considerable impact at several different levels, on two main groups. The first point to stress is that MicroPasts volunteers will be participating in a knowledge exchange programme aimed at developing and implementing a community-led kind of platform and project management. The idea behind this programme emerged from discussions with regular volunteers and from their desire to take forward the work conducted until now and help maintain the digital resources created in the lifetime of MicroPasts, so that they can continue using and benefiting from them. In addition, the programme will facilitate the sharing of different skills and knowledge and, thus, offer to volunteers and other core staff meaningful learning opportunities, which will also be important for employment and career development purposes.

The second point to emphasise is the transformative impact of this initiative on heritage policy and practice. By the end of the Follow-on, key representatives from these two groups participating in the workshops will have co-produced new knowledge on the value of crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding in the heritage sector, to the benefit of heritage and heritage institutions, individuals and communities, online or offline. While there has been initial thinking on these topics, there hasn't yet been a moment of focussed and collaborative discussion resulting in operational recommendations for the heritage sector. Workshop delegates will also reach conclusions on best practice for evaluating web-based heritage projects that leverage crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding methods. The outcomes of the workshops will be key to understanding whether new policy and new guidance should be developed to address the specific needs of crowd-fuelled projects, and also to inform future grant-making decisions in these areas. In addition, our evaluation guidelines will be useful for grantees, since, for example, only very general suggestions are currently offered by HLF on the best ways to measure the results of their projects. For heritage practitioners, we expect the core value of the Follow-on to be that of obtaining clear advice on the most cost-effective solutions for including crowd-sourcing projects in their educational and curatorial programmes, and crowd-funding as part of their development strategies.

To communicate the project outcomes to national and international audiences of researchers, policy-makers and practitioners in the cultural sector, we will write a paper summarising and commenting on the workshop discussions and publish it in a relevant journal such as Cultural Trends. In addition, the report on the evaluation of the MicroPasts project and the evaluation guidelines that will be produced will be made available for download from the MicroPasts main website and archived open access with UCL Discovery. We also, importantly, rely on the input of workshop participants and particularly of those mentioned in the Collaboration section, to disseminate the outcomes of this Follow-on widely, amongst their professional networks.