RunCoCo - Beyond Collections: Crowdsourcing for public engagement

Debate and discussion about academic crowdsourcing and community content in the UK and beyond, with highlights and interesting ideas from the day.

Melissa Highton (Oxford University Computing Services) examines how Oxford's crowdsourced and community collections of open educational resources are supported and embedded in practice for sustainability.

Gail Durbin (Victoria and Albert Museum) examines how a nationally focused museum can use its web presence to foster the interest and expertise of users, as well as sharing its own authoritative information?

Arfon Smith (University of Oxford) presents the experience of the Zooniverse team with their citizen science and crowdsourcing efforts and the changing role of the citizen scientist.

Alun Edwards and Stuart Lee (Oxford University Computing Services) present their experiences of running public participation days in Germany to gather everyday objects from World War I.

'Time Travels' from the creator of How To Be A Retronaut and inventor of the Retroscope, and a leader of Museumpreneurs.

The story of the super-transcribers involved in the project to understand the thousands of manuscripts of Jeremy Bentham.

Chris Morgan 'Mog' (University of Glamorgan, GEECS) presents on the Communities 2.0 digital inclusion project and the collection of digital stories that community members make. Stories hold a special power to engage people and when those stories are personal, honest and genuine they can captivate and inspire in a way that excites, moves and motivates us. All personal stories have a special honesty that the storyteller themselves is not always conscious of, as so much can be said in a pause, a change of tone and a turn of phrase in which we hear the truth and genuineness of experience. As part of the Communities 2.0 digital inclusion project Mog's team collects digital stories that community members make for themselves, their community, family and friends using technology that many experience for the first time. This is the story of their work to date.

Beyond 2011 Keynote presentation from Robert Ashton, author of The Barefoot Entrepreneur.

Melissa Highton, Head of the Learning Technologies group at Oxford University Computing Services opens the conference. She referred to the themes of earlier Beyond conferences, and introduced today's theme "Beyond Collections".