Public Participation in Museums and Cultural Heritage Sites: iCommunity Mobile Application Ahmad Nasrolahi Vito Messina Cristina Gena Tech4Culture Phd program Historical Studies Dept. Computer Science Dept. University of Torino University of Torino University of Torino Turin, Italy Turin, Italy Turin, Italy ahmadnasrolahi@gmail.com vito.messina@unito.it cristina.gena@unito.it ABSTRACT to this convention, cultural heritage institutions inevitably have This paper presents iCommunity, an application that will be aimed to apply a public participatory approach. Moreover, a number of at finding a universal method for inclusive societies in decision- papers have focused on the importance of public participation in making processes for cultural heritage management. iCommunity heritage conservation and tourism management [10, 13]. is being designed as a mobile application facilitating public par- “Public participation is the general term for diverse formal pro- ticipation in cultural heritage management. The main idea is to cesses by which public concerns, needs, and values are incorpo- give all people, who are affected by a decision, the opportunity to rated in governmental decisions. Public participation involves the be involved in the decision-making process. Any cultural heritage use of techniques such as public meetings and hearings, advisory institution will be able to publish its activities on the application committees, interactive workshops, interviews, questionnaires, fo- so as to evaluate users’ feedback before the implementation of the cus groups, and other methods to identify public concerns and activity itself. Based on the user’s location, the application displays preferences and address them during decision making.” [5]. Public ongoing activities to the user himself. As a part of a participatory participation applies different values and aspects for reaching the approach, users share each other’s experience or data related to best results. the posted activity. They also can show their agreement or dis- According to the core values provided by the International As- agreement to the activities by voting. The comments, votes and sociation for Public Participation-IAP2, it is widely acceptable that user’s activities will be analysed real time for helping authorities to people who are affected by a decision have the right to be involved consider the consequence of their activities for more transparent in the decision-making process. This public participation must as- and effective decision-making. sure that the people’s concern will affect the decision. In addition, “public participation promotes sustainable decisions by recognizing CCS CONCEPTS and communicating the needs and interests of all participants, in- cluding decision makers.” [9]. The engagement of those affected by, • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in HCI; • or interested in, a decision must be facilitated by interactive meth- Applied computing → Arts and humanities. ods for achieving the maximum participation. In this respect, useful and trustworthy information will help people to participate in a KEYWORDS meaningful way. Finally, the results of participation must be pub- Participatory study, cultural heritage, mobile applications lished for communicating to participants how their input affected ACM Reference Format: the decision. Ahmad Nasrolahi, Vito Messina, and Cristina Gena. 2020. Public Partici- In this paper we present iCommunity, a mobile application which pation in Museums and Cultural Heritage Sites: iCommunity Mobile Ap- would like to facilitate public participation in cultural heritage man- plication. In Proceedings of 𝐴𝑉 𝐼 2𝐶𝐻 2020: Workshop on Advanced Visual agement. The main idea is that all people, who are somehow affected Interfaces and Interactions in Cultural Heritage (𝐴𝑉 𝐼 2𝐶𝐻 2020). ACM, New by a decision, have the right to be involved in the decision-making York, NY, USA, 5 pages. process. Any cultural heritage institution will be able to publish activities on the application as a means to evaluate the users’ feed- 1 INTRODUCTION back before the implementation of any activity. We are working on Public participation in cultural heritage, with particular regard to public participation in the Historic City of Yazd as the main case conservation, has been a concern ever since the Venice Charter study. Yazd is a world heritage city in Central Iran, where more (1964) and it still is to this day [2]. This approach has also been than 400,000 people are living in buffer and core zones. Based on highlighted in World Heritage Documents. The Faro Convention [1] the user’s location, the application displays ongoing and future adopted a shift in focus from the conservation of cultural heritage activities to the user herself (Figure 1). As a part of participatory ap- values to the value of cultural heritage for the society. In this case, proach, the users share their experience or data related to the posted it is necessary to engage public and local people in all stages of activity with other users. They can also show their agreement or cultural heritage conservation and management [4]. According disagreement to the scheduled activities by voting. In addition, iCommunity will be able to extract and show all relative activities 𝐴𝑉 𝐼 2𝐶𝐻 2020, September 29, Island of Ischia, Italy posted on related websites such as ICOMOS1 (International Council © Copyright 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). 1 https://www.icomos.org/en 𝐴𝑉 𝐼 2𝐶𝐻 2020, September 29, Island of Ischia, Italy Ahmad Nasrolahi, Vito Messina, and Cristina Gena on Monuments and Sites), ICCROM2 (International Centre for the facilitates the relationships between the general public and admin- Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property), istration. The application helps people to report urban problems to UNESCO World Heritage Centre3 , and social networks (e.g. Face- authorities via photos taken on-site and thanks to a description of book and Instagram). The analysed data will be shown real time relevant issues. The application encourages authorities to respond for users who help authorities to consider the consequence of their to the public needs by making the citizens active. FlashPoll [12] activities for transparent and effective decision-making. is another application for public participation based on location This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents Back- polling. The users take part in geo-located polls by answering differ- ground and Related Works, Section 3 presents the iCommunity ent questions within a specified physical space such as a building, application, while Section 4 concludes the paper and presents fu- a neighbourhood, a city or a region. The results are available on ture work. the application after polling. The FlashPoll works as a place-related tool for facilitating the interaction between public and urban plan- ning administrators and politicians within a limited time and space. In addition, the application makes public participation in urban development more productive in a short time. Moreover, Lost State College (LSC) was designed for the local community to contribute their stories about the history of Pennsyl- vania [8]. Later on, in 2014, a society organization, programmers and social scientists produced Democracy OS application in Argentina. They seek to open up the public institutions in decision-making processes [3]. By considering the simplicity of using smartphone applications and difficulty of implementing public participation, the assumption is that mobile applications aim to streamline the participatory approach in cultural heritage management. The main features of the above-mentioned applications are immediate inter- action between authorities and people, polling surveys, sharing the stories and including societies in decision-making processes that have been presented in different apps and contexts. The iCommu- nity will combine and improve these functions in order to provide a unique application for implementing people-centered approaches in museums and cultural heritage sites. In fact, iCommunity is a combination of useful features in the mentioned applications by improving some functionalities. This ap- plication develops the uMayer app by adding voting and workshop functions while utilizing polling features in the FlashPoll. We used the concept of uMayer app for designing iCommunity by adding some features such as voting part. Figure 1: Project’s location on iCommunity. 3 iCommunity The main goal of this application is to find a universal method for inclusive societies in decision-making processes for cultural her- 2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORKS itage management. The idea is to encourage different stakeholders, One practical example of public participation in cultural heritage such as local people living in or around the museums and cultural management is the Dresden Elbe Valley case [7]. It opened a debate heritage sites, to take active roles in decision-making processes about whether local people would be willing or not to be in a related to management and conservation. Furthermore, this mobile world heritage site if it was up for a vote. The construction of the application will provide sufficient information and clear data for di- Waldschlößchenbrücke Bridge was vital for the city, which led the rect and indirect education of users by holding different workshops. Federal Republic of Germany to put the decision up for locals to Data shown in the application will also help people to understand vote whether they wanted a construction of the Bridge (which the reasons behind the implementation of planned activities by meant being delisted) or designating it as a world heritage site. taking part in comments and talking with experts or professionals Interestingly, a little over half of the eligible people participated (Figure 2). In addition, it also aims to make the decision-making in the referendum with 67.92% voting for the first option. It took a process clearer and more transparent by presenting voting func- long time to make the decision. tions and showing all comments for users. Finally, the application Many mobile applications have been released for local commu- outcomes (which include analysed data collected by feedback, vot- nity purposes. uMayeor [11] is a crowdsourcing application that ing, communication, etc.) will help to understand the real needs 2 https://www.iccrom.org/ and interests of different stakeholders in cultural heritage sites and 3 https://whc.unesco.org/en museums. Public Participation in Museums and Cultural Heritage Sites: iCommunity Mobile Application 𝐴𝑉 𝐼 2𝐶𝐻 2020, September 29, Island of Ischia, Italy Figure 3: Internal and External stakeholders in cultural her- itage activities. and future activities will be published by institutions, then the users can discuss posted activities in the form of comments and talks to an Figure 2: Main functions of iCommunity. expert. They can also vote for scheduled or posted activities. Based on users’ location, comments and voting, the authorities will be able 3.1 Target User Groups to assess the users’ behaviour for taking it into consideration in their The engaged stakeholders in a given cultural heritage site are di- decision-making process. The application will be able to extract vided into three main categories; community of place, community all information related to museums, cultural heritage conservation of interest and community of practice [6]. In each category, the and management from social media (e.g. Instagram, Facebook) and stakeholders are: websites (e.g. ICOMOS, ICCROM, WHC, etc.) by APIs. This feature will show collective data about cultural heritage activities for the • Community of place, namely local people living in the core iCommunity users. zone, buffer zone and other urban areas as public; This application, which is under prototyping, will provide var- • Community of interest, namely local cultural heritage NGOs ious ways of login by using social network accounts (Facebook, (Non-Governmental Organisation), media, private sectors; Instagram, Google, etc.) or by direct registration on the application • Community of practice, namely Cultural Heritage Research itself. There will be two types of accounts: (1) institutional accounts Institutions, Municipality, experts, Governmental Cultural (profiles for decision-makers in e.g. cultural heritage sites and muse- Heritage Organization and Administration of World Heritage ums) and (2) personal accounts (public participants who are affected Protection. by a decision) with different functionality. Institutions will work These three main stakeholders can be divided into two main as a local admin to operate their profile by posting the activities, categories, internal and external: internal stakeholders are those holding workshops, creating sub-profiles for their experts and us- people susceptible to direct effect by a decision; external stake- ing analysed data. They could also tag useful workshops posted by holders are those indirectly involved with the cultural heritage other institutions for their members (e.g. e-learning programs). site (Figure 3). Internal stakeholders are living within (or by) the Almost all cultural heritage sites and museums will have some site, external stakeholders are engaged in coordination, funding, training courses for various audiences in different topics and for- resourcing and publication of the issues related to related heritage mats. This part of the iCommunity application can be used as on- or sites. The iCommunity application will be designed to fulfil goals off-line e-learning and workshops for users. Since some workshops and needs of all the above stakeholders. and e-learning programs are the same, the application will classify them in a group. The institutions will be able to tag the similar 3.2 iCommunity App workshops and e-learning programs to their profiles for avoiding iCommunity is going to be designed as a smartphone application repetition. This feature will not only improve the quality of training for facilitating the interaction between cultural heritage authorities courses, but it also decreases the cost of production for institutions. and users so as to stimulate public participation and engagement in In addition, this ability will make the workshops and e-learning cultural heritage management. Through the application, ongoing programs available to larger audiences. 𝐴𝑉 𝐼 2𝐶𝐻 2020, September 29, Island of Ischia, Italy Ahmad Nasrolahi, Vito Messina, and Cristina Gena New activities will be posted by institutions on the home page feedbacks will be used as participatory cultural heritage conserva- and user’s feedback as likes, comments and check-ins, will be im- tion, so the users can report a problem to the experts. Besides, the mediately shown. Based on the user’s location, the application will comments will display the various overviews about the activities. suggest the users to join the closest institutions for joining. Most It will also help users to make the activity more transparent by “for often, a number of museums and cultural heritage sites exist in a and against” ideas. This will be beneficial for decision-makers; by city with disparate activities and workshops, thus the users can analysing the feedback, they can evaluate the hidden consequence join in each of them depending on their interests. Besides location, of each activity for more consideration. each user will be able to search topics for joining their favourite activities among different institutions. In addition, the users involve 4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK the posted activities by directly writing comments. Each user will iCommunity will be an application for facilitating interactions be able to vote and post a comment to the activity and reply to among different users involved in cultural heritage sites and muse- other comments. ums activities. It will help authorities include people in decision- The most important part of the application is the voting func- making processes by inclusive society and people-centered ap- tionality. Since the group age and other user’s specifications will proach. Furthermore, the application will provide a strong network be shown in the user profile if users decide to allow so, collected between cultural heritage institutions for more collaboration. The data will be very important for decision-makers. All collected users’ project is currently in a prototyping phase. This project is part of a data (such as socio-demographic data, actions, and comments) will PhD study aimed at using new technology for public participation be analysed and classified in background by a machine learning in cultural heritage management. component, and inferred needs and interests will be classified and As future features, since this application focuses on public partic- used for taking the best decision. After voting to each project, a ipation, we are going to engage different target groups in designing bonus will be added to the user’s account as an incentive for en- the app and its functionalities following a participatory approach. couraging participants to vote (ex. visiting the site or museum for We would like to ensure the usability of the iCommunity app follow- free), and also other gamification strategies will be added in order ing the real users’ needs and interests by applying a participatory to increase user’s participation in the decisions (Figure 4). approach before implementing and launching the application. In the second phase of development, the successful activities will be used as an educational program for museums and cultural authorities in order to implement public participation in their activ- ities. This feature aims to find out an applicable, universal method for people-centered approach in cultural heritage management. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project has received funding from the European Union’s Hori- zon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 754511 in the frame of the PhD Program Technologies for Cultural Heritage (T4C) held by the University of Torino. Ahmad Nasrolahi would like to express his sincere gratitude to his research supervisors for their guidance, patience and encouragement. REFERENCES [1] Council of Europe. 2005. Council of Europe Framework Convention on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society. https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full- list/-/conventions/rms/0900001680083746. Accessed: 4 May 2020. [2] Council of Europe. 2017. The Faro Convention Action Plan Handbook 2018-2019. https://www.coe.int/en/web/culture-and-heritage/faro-action-plan. Accessed: 12 April 2020. [3] Democraciaenred.org. 2020. Democracia En Red. https://democraciaenred.org. Accessed: 1 March 2020. [4] Azni Mohd Dian and Nuraisyah Chua Abdullah. 2013. 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