Meet the Members Council: Francesca Di Donato

I joined the Europeana Network Association (ENA) in 2015, and I have then been elected in the Members Council. My goal was to promote and to spread Europeana’s vision and mission, and to increase the quantity and quality of data in Europeana through ad-hoc initiatives both top-down and bottom-up, arising from communities of practice. As my last year as a councillor is approaching, I would like to share the work done and, more importantly, what I’m currently committed to.

Supporting Europeana’s ecosystem

Being a councillor involves several tasks and activities related to the ENA organisation and its relations with Europeana. Over the last year, I’ve been involved in three working groups: the Governance working group, which aims to address the governance of the ENA and ensure its good and democratic development; the Europeana Pro working group, willing to identify business needs and priorities with relevant stakeholders/communities, and support the development of the new Europeana Pro website; and the #AllezCulture working group.

Moreover, I’ve been an active member of the Benchmarking Europeana Task Force. The purpose of the project was to evaluate the methodology and content of a first study benchmarking Europeana as a cultural information service, in order to propose a framework for future evaluations and benchmarkings. The result of our work is publicly available on Europeana Pro.

Reaching out to external communities

But my activities included communication and engagement actions toward external communities as well. Last October, I took part in the FORCE2017 Changing the culture conference, during which I presented  Europeana’s vision and our objectives. Communities such as FORCE11, Scholarly Commons, OPERAS and Annotating All Knowledge Coalition can be seen as a unique and wide community through which we can build joint actions.

My work currently focuses on the open science advocacy and, more specifically, in creating liaisons between the ENA and the open science communities that share similar visions and commitments. We should work together to build an open, FAIR and sustainable ecosystem for science communication. To this respect, I’m inviting the community to join the GO FAIR initiative and conduct common actions to make cultural objects effectively findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

To learn more about all this and to collaborate, feel free to contact me!

#AllezCulture