The RE-usable Fashion Museum

Applying Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing for a Study Collection
This blog post was contributed by Olivier Schulbaum from Platoniq

On the 14th June cultural heritage professionals were invited to a workshop that took place at the Mode Museum (MoMu), in Antwerp. During this event they learned how to work with co-creation and crowdfunding processes designed to bring users into closer contact with their collections, including ways to attract valuable assets and services from users such as new data, voluntary work, financial contributions, and even actual collection pieces. The workshop was held by the Goteo Foundation and MoMu, with the support of Europeana. Goteo Foundation is a non-profit platform for civic crowdfunding and collaboration on citizen initiatives and social, cultural, and educational projects.

MoMu and the University of Antwerp have been compiling a fashion collection intended for research training and inspiration: the Study MoMu collection. This collection is available on Europeana Fashion and contains about 600 objects provided by MoMu and around 1,000 objects coming from the Heritage and Sustainability Collection from the University of Antwerp. The goals of these two institutions include improving metadata and images of the study collection, and to make them available on Europeana Fashion under an open license. To see some highlights of the Study MoMu collection, check out this Pinterest board.

Bridal gown, photo by Stany Dederen for MoMu, CC-BY-SA

Taking into account the importance of unlocking collections, MoMu and the University of Antwerp have partnered with Goteo Foundation to build a hybrid crowdfunding/crowdsourcing framework geared towards the creation of a “reusable fashion museum”. The study collection, to be released in September, was selected as the use-case for the workshop, because it allows participants to use and re-use the collection as they choose.

The workshop posed the following questions for exploration:

• How can crowd engagement support open standards for collaboration?

• How can this collaboration help design a comprehensive, educative lab context?

• How can we integrate the entire process (conception, design, prototyping, financing) for new project development?

The workshop started with a few presentations introducing relevant case studies and available alternative funding tools for cultural projects. Dieter Suls of the MoMu Library presented the use-case “Study MoMu” collection to participants. Anne Debreuck, a consultant at the King Baudouin Foundation, followed with a short talk on Instruments for Cultural Patronage. With more than 30 years’ experience and a special focus on the preservation of heritage, the King Baudouin Foundation, based in Belgium, manages philanthropic projects, options and instruments. These include practical ways of joint fundraising, such as their “Donor’s Circle” and “Friends Of” funds, which permit individuals to join together to support projects of their choice, collectively known as their “Philanthropy Close to Home” project. In 2015, the King Baudouin Foundation made over €30 million available to thousands of organizations; funding projects addressing civic engagement, development, health, heritage, poverty, and more.

Next, a presentation, “Putting the crowd in the picture”, highlighted different crowdfunding platforms and processes, including micro-credits and peer-to-peer loans. Platoniq representatives also explained the Goteo model, which is based on social responsibility, the right to tax returns for donors who support commons-based initiatives (such as digital heritage), and creating wealth through developing open data programs.

In the first hands-on session the participants learned how to prepare a crowdfunding campaign using the Goteo model (and saw how a crowdfunding platform actually works). They also studied cases of real campaigns that were centered on open data and open culture and funded through Goteo, such as the VanGo Yourself campaign.

In the second hands-on session, the participants designed their own “RE-usable Fashion Museum” campaign, learning the ropes of crowdfunding as a strategy for financing projects, but also for building a community and creating greater social impact. You can watch a video of the workshop here.

As a result of the workshop, the MoMU crowdfunding campaign focused on the study collection will be published in September on goteo.org. The campaign aims to sponsor the acquisition and digitalization of new items for the collection, including personal items contributed by supporters. Most importantly, the crowdfunding campaign will focus on building a “reusable fashion museum”, a physical exhibition that provides users with direct access to the collection pieces, which means the possibility of coming to MoMu and getting hands-on with the collection (by seeing items up close and touching them) and also making the digitalized items available for open re-use.

In addition to this outcome, the majority of the participants stated in the questionnaire at the end of the workshop that they would use Goteo’s methodology for a crowdfunding campaign, and that they would be interested in organizing a similar workshop in their museums.

Workshops like this one are part of a growing ecosystem, where cultural heritage and philanthropy professionals can discuss things like setting up co-design labs to examine new digital financing trends, such as crowdfunding and blockchain. The ultimate aim is to provide solutions in participatory grantmaking and funds allocation for non-profit organizations, but at the same time, give greater visibility and highlight the benefits of a more open and democratic governance of networks and processes.

So, if you are a cultural institution interested in organizing a similar workshop about crowdfunding and crowdsourcing for new, groundbreaking prototypes, we’re ready for you! Please join us, get in touch and we can make a forward-thinking difference together.