AvoinGLAM and partners are hosting an open culture think & do fest in Oulu, Finland in 8–10 June 2026 as part of the Oulu2026 – European Capital of Culture program. They invited advocates of open culture, policy makers, technologists and creative thinkers from near and far to address Heritage at Risk. The event takes place in the newly renovated Oulu Central Library Saari and hosts a day-long open culture fair (open for the public) and a 2-day think & do workshop.
The conversation is shaped around three big ideas:
culture as a global public good and everyone’s right; questions of who governs
open digital heritage and on whose terms; and how platforms and tools can be
made more accessible and interoperable for under-resourced communities.
Examples
The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space connects materials related to Mari, Seto, Võro, Udmurt, and Moldavian Csángó communities across multiple institutional collections.
Historical ethnographic collections often contain outdated transcription systems, inconsistent naming conventions, or descriptions inaccessible to present-day communities and researchers.
The presentation discusses how the dispersed legacy of researchers such as János Jankó and Aladár Bán can be reconnected across Hungarian, Estonian, and Finnish collections through multilingual metadata harmonisation.
<!---
Translation, metadata enrichment, and multilingual controlled vocabularies can reconnect fragmented archival collections with living cultural communities and contemporary research infrastructures.
--->
Next Steps
Expand multilingual lexicons and controlled vocabularies for Finno-Ugric
cultural heritage.
Improve interoperability between Wikibase, Wikimedia Commons, and
institutional catalogues.
Develop community-based workflows for metadata correction and annotation.
Support machine-readable archival descriptions that remain understandable to
both experts and source communities.
Related Publication
Federating Open Knowledge through Wikibase: The Case of The Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space
