Europeana Impact Community seeks enthusiastic members to join new Steering Group

Since we launched the Impact Playbook in 2017, I’ve heard a range of examples about where and how it has been used. It has opened up conversations about metrics and measurements, about quantifying the greater good component of working with and for cultural heritage. And I’ve heard that you want to have more opportunities to talk more with each other, and learn from each other. We’re working on all of these things and I can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months.

But I’m pleased to share with you an important step forward made in these past few months: the Impact Community has been adopted by the Europeana Network Association (ENA), to help provide the support and drive it needs to blossom. This moves it from a loosely designed community run by the Europeana Foundation, to a community with ambitions led by a small Steering Group, committed to creating the conditions members need to share and learn together around the topics of impact.

The Impact Community will continue to operate as a global community, welcoming members from around the world keen to learn and explore the topic of impact in the sector. And whilst ENA provides the governance structure to help steer the community, ENA membership is not a requirement to join the impact community.

Meet the Europeana Impact Community steering group

The Steering Group is made up of five members: two Councillors - elected officials of the Europeana Network Association, two members of the community and the community manager (that’s me). To make a start, I’ve worked with the Association, and a group of Councillors interested in impact to elect Playbook practitioners Maja Drabczyk and Dafydd Tudur to the roles of Chair and Vice Chair respectively. Together we have developed a provisional plan for 2019, to describe the areas we think most important to the community to discuss.

"We want to keep the momentum going and to create an environment in which we can all discuss the impact of our daily work, long-term strategies, ambitions. We want to share lessons learned so far and discuss challenges ahead of us. All this, with the needs of our audiences and other stakeholders in the heart of our actions." - Maja Drabczyk, Chair of the Europeana Impact Community

Maja and Dafydd were early adopters of the Playbook, having had a preview at an event run by Europeana under the Estonian EU presidency in 2017. They’re also involved in the ongoing development of the next version of the Playbook. From that early introduction, Dafydd took the exercises and ran through them with his colleagues at The National Library of Wales, which led them to apply these methods to measure the impact of their Wiki projects. Maja worked with her colleagues at the National Film Archive-Audiovisual Institute Poland to first translate the Playbook into Polish, and then used it in seminars with GLAM institutions to structure conversations around future challenges and ambitions.

In 2019 the Impact Community will organise around three core areas

In the past two Members Council meetings, the remit for the Impact Community has been developed by a group of impact-enthusiasts and practitioners: Marco De Niet, Merete Sanderhoff, Antje Schmidt, Karin Glasmann, Barbara Fischer, Rob Davis, James Morley, Michal Čudrnák, Hans van der Linden, Maja Drabczyk and Dafydd Tudur. Together we identified the hot topics within impact right now, topics that we want to be talking more about, and areas where we help support the work of the Europeana Foundation.

These form the basis of the 2019 agenda for the Impact Community, which has a role in:

Supporting the development of the impact toolkit, most notably in reviewing and testing phases 2-4 of the Impact Playbook, and helping to increase usage of the Playbook by encouraging and supporting its translation into a range of European languages.
Communicating to audiences beyond the Europeana Impact Community the importance and value of impact assessment, and the Framework as a methodology, supporting the communication of impact work such as presentations and workshops, including it on the agenda of the main Europeana event in 2019, and by acting as ambassadors.
Supporting Europeana Impact Community members to become practitioners within their own organisations, domains and/or countries/regions, transferring knowledge, skills, tools and resources relating to impact assessment, and the Europeana Impact Framework. Creating case studies and examples, developing a crash course and adding to the repository of information shared through the impact toolkit.

Step forward and join the steering group

Before we move on, we need your help. We’re looking for two members of this community to join us on the Steering Group, and help nurture discussion around impact throughout the sector. We want this role to complement your interest in impact, so we hope that you will want to be visible and an anchor around one of the core topics on our agenda in 2019, and join us for quarterly calls to discuss progress and share ideas.

If you think this sounds like you, we’d love to hear from you. Submit your entry before 29 May 2019.