Two new Creative Informatics Challenge Projects have opened up, looking for creative digital businesses to address key problems facing cultural, creative, and heritage organisations in Scotland.
Respondents can be small companies (SMEs), teams or individuals that have the skills to answer a challenge, using data (from the challenge holder and/or other sources) and using a data-driven approach/technology.
Funding of up to £20,000 is available to successful respondents, who will retain all or part of the intellectual property for their work, enabling them to commercialise any products or services produced.
Applications for this round of challenges are open now and close at 17:00 on Monday 2nd August 2021.
The round five challenge holders are St Giles’ Cathedral and Leith For Ever.
The Challenges
St Giles’ Cathedral
Situated in the heart of Edinburgh, St Giles’ Cathedral is both a working church and a 900-year-old heritage site. Pre-Covid, the cathedral welcomed over 1 million visitors a year, with 80% coming from outside of the UK.
Considered the ‘Mother Church’ of World Presbyterianism, St Giles’ is a spiritual centre point for much of the Scottish diaspora and plays a pastoral role for many people with Scottish ancestors who are ‘coming home’.
St Giles’ challenge is to develop an interactive, visually engaging, accessible interface that will allow physical and online visitors to explore Scotland’s past and their Scottish roots. They hope to be able to provide a search engine based on data from the National Records of Scotland and/or academic databases, enabling visitors to search for their ancestors using a name, profession, or location.
They would like a Challenge Respondent to develop a solution that offers two-way interaction, providing visitors with the information they are looking for, while also collecting visitor data to develop an interactive visualisation that demonstrates the reach of Scotland’s people today.
Leith Forever
Leith For Ever is a community brand created in 2020 by a collective of Leith-based culture and heritage organisations. Their first project was a crowdsourced online campaign to mark the centenary of Leith’s amalgamation into the City of Edinburgh, presenting contributions from local businesses, groups and individuals to connect audiences with grassroots stories and discoveries in the area.
Leith For Ever’s challenge is to help their contributors engage with new and existing audiences and where possible, monetise interactions by encouraging audiences to buy from, tip, or donate to contributors as appropriate.
They would like a Challenge Respondent to develop a platform that provides new ways for their contributors and content to be discovered by audiences and seek an accessible solution that can be used easily by audiences and contributors alike.
Finding a solution to this challenge would enable Leith For Ever to explore new ways of paying creators and managing rights to culture, community and heritage content and creations.
Guidelines for entry, eligibility criteria and application forms can all be found on the Creative Informatics Challenge Projects page.
Creative Informatics
Creative Informatics is one of the two creative industries innovation centres in Scotland (the other being InGAME). CI is the Edinburgh-based research and development innovation centre which aims to bring the city’s creative industries and tech sectors together, providing funding and development opportunities that enable creative individuals and organisations to explore how data can be used to drive ground-breaking new products, businesses and experiences.
Creative Informatics is nurturing local talent through five key funding programmes and regular events that support Edinburgh’s creative industries to do inspiring things with data. For example, the organisation ran the Games Go Guerrilla lab at the end of 2020 and also funded the research project to map the games industry in Scotland.
You can (and should) find out more about the awesome things they do.
Photo by Skye Studios on Unsplash
