Mutual Support, Debates & Great Ideas for Improving the OH Participatory Platform

In our last phase of our engagement strategy we wanted to check the health of our labs and their platforms. As a closing step this would wrap up the learning and capacity building thus far co-created and shared by Platoniq within the meta platform and serve as a form of self evaluation for future self directed improvement by the labs. Platform health entails digital maintenance, but also the communication lines developed between communities and their respective platform. The big questions behind our platform health check are: Are people aware of, able to access, stay informed, and participate on the platform? 

Before the outbreak of Covid-19 we presented and surveyed the labs to evaluate and understand the progress of the digital facet of their heritage re-use project. However, since the pandemia the question of not just of a digital facet but a digital transition has become an urgent and crucial topic across most fields as well as in cultural heritage. 

The tool we developed covers the basics of what each platform should check when evaluating both their growth and what needs to be improved. 

To create the tool we first developed our ‘personas’ or the community of people who are interested in each lab’s information, progress, and success. The personas represent different facets of a digital community that are at the heart of OpenHeritage whose interests are core to maintaining engagement and participation for both the physical and digital.

We start with as the basis for the health check the ‘persona’ resident whose participation is what makes any cultural heritage lab or project come to life. 

We then included three more integral personas to evaluate the platform:

• Best Resident Ever
• Interested Public Administrator
• Participation Geeks such as us over at Platoniq
• Overwhelmed academic

Questions were created to inspect how and if their interests and needs as a part of the lab were being met. From there a criteria was developed and illustrated as building blocks to create a healthy and active living lab. In our presentation we used an illustration of a plant to communicate that this is a process oriented around growth and the underlying work of regular maintenance.

Before the presentation of the tool partners were surveyed and the results were presented to take the temperature of how each of the labs were doing. However, even after this exercise we do believe that the questions and ideas are a resource that the labs can continually take into account to evaluate their work and the ‘health’ of their digital heritage community.