Lab: Open city, co-creation and collective memory

What is an open city? How could we open up the city's imaginary and memory to collective construction? What would Barcelona’s streets be called if history had recognized the merits of groups we know very little about today? In order to find out, we propose visualizing the Barcelona of today, one that recalls a certain historical memory that can be seen through its nomenclature, and co-creating the city’s memory. We propose unearthing the names, collective processes and stories connected to the city: unpublished facts about Barcelona that we would like to recover and see reflected in street names and published on Wikipedia or as open data.
 
Can you help us to imagine a more open Barcelona? 
We’re looking for groups and individuals who work in the fields of art, history, data visualization, documentaries, storytelling, research and Wikipedia editing, as hackers and programmers, and more.

 

Venue

Fabra i Coats
Carrer de Sant Adrià, 20
08030 Barcelona
Espanya

When

20/10/2018 10.30h

Organized by

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, DiMMONS research group of the IN3, Ajuntament de Barcelona

Program

WHAT WE WANT TO DO
 
“Wiki-Data-Thon” Ciutat Oberta 2018 is a Barcelona Open City Biennial of Thought activity.
 
Among other things, we propose revising Barcelona's street names and the geographical distribution of the memory of collective processes, particularly those related to women. We’ll be working with various data sources and we’ll edit Wikipedia on everything related to collective processes in Barcelona, the history of public service in the city from a perspective of gender and its presence in the public space. We’ll rise to the challenge of visualizing the city with maps and street and place names that recover stories from the past, historic events and figures, the memory of co-created events and phenomena of a city that is open to its own reinvention.
 
Visualize the Barcelona of today
How has the city's memory been constructed by its street names, in other words, through its nomenclature? How many streets are dedicated to processes of collective involvement with the city? How many of the city's streets are dedicated to women? Who are these women and men? This is one of the issues that we’ll be putting forward for debate to be able to see under what criteria the city of Barcelona has been constructed.
 
Collate and prioritize knowledge: information sources and datasets 
With the aim of recovering the city’s history of collective processes of involvement and co-creation, particularly those connected with women and the female presence in Barcelona's history, as well as the history of collaborative production in the city, we’ll be working with experts from various areas of expertise to debate what we want to highlight, and improve public information on Wikipedia and in open data sources.
 
Reconsider what the co-creation of the city means
New technologies have offered new opportunities and challenges for co-creating knowledge and collectively constructing memory. Barcelona is one of the cities with the most history of collective processes and is a pioneer in public service creation communities. We want to value and raise awareness of these cases on the basis of their presence of associated concepts and key examples. This vein will feed from the materials and databases of the P2Pvalue and DECODE European projects and the Cultura Viva project on collaborative culture.
 
Create an open map of Barcelona
We will build a map and an imaginary naming of Barcelona's public spaces, incorporating information resulting from the collaboration. We will publish this information in a data repository and in the nomenclature created during the session, and we will make constructive and considered contributions to different open encyclopaedia articles to try to improve them or even create new ones. We will work on a series of open data and search for new ones, raw material with which we aim to uncover the city’s mysteries.
 
Organized by: Barcelona City Council and the IN3 DiMMONS research group.
 

Confirm attendance

Sign up!