Just launched the Rewired Culture event for the 27th March at the Guardian offices in King’s Cross.

What’s Rewired Culture you ask?

Well here’s the description and big thanks to the Rewired State crowd:

Rewired Culture

Britain is a creative culture. We have a vibrant developer community, a growing and active entrepreneurial base and a vast, rich array of culture assets. How can we bring these together to create new opportunities for data owners and developers? How do we encourage links between data repositories such as museums, broadcasters and the wider community like data.gov.uk or the “London Datastore”? How do we ensure that the exciting work already underway in a number of organizations is shared more generally, so even smaller bodies and SMEs can learn from best practice and find workable routes to market? What are the cultural content business models for the 21st century? How do creators, curators, developers and entrepreneurs work together?

Rewired Culture is a day long event on 27th March 2010 organized by DCMS which is intended to explore these issues and more besides.

Rewired Culture has two strands – the first is a hackday bringing together data owners, data users, developers and people with ideas to see what they can create in a day. This builds on the very successful Rewired State events held in 2009.

The second strand is a halfday unconference style event starting at midday and running in parallel with the hackday for data owners, entrepreneurs, data users and communites to discuss business models, funding mechanisms and challenges.

We will be encouraging constant communication between the two strands because by the end of the day we want the event to have come up with a number of projects that people want to take forward on technical or business grounds, preferably both!

These chosen projects will then be used as exemplars for the Chief Executives and Chairs of the major national cultural institutions, broadcasters and key figures from the creative economy. They will be used as both an inspiration and a challenge to that community.

Rewired Culture will be open to all and you can register at http://rewiredstate.org/culture#register. If you would like more information then read the FAQs or contact us at rewired@culture.gsi.gov.uk.

FAQs

What about IPR?

Rewired Culture is not intended to solve every issue around intellectual property rights, instead we intend to focus on freely available assets and where IPR is then identified as a showstopper we will capture that point and raise it at the later meeting of Chief Executives and Chairs.

Why should I give away my ideas?

Ideas only have value when shared. We want to encourage people to share their ideas about both projects and business models. This is an opportunity to engage with the wider community and test your ideas. If you then want to take them to market then we will cheer you on. The only IPR we retain is in the Rewired Culture concept itself – everything else is down to you, the participants.

What happens to the Rewired Culture Projects?

We are still working on this and will be testing them at the event but the current thinking is that we will support the shortlisted projects where possible with hosting and facilitation.

We are also looking at the idea of running a simulation where one or more chosen projects would be given the opportunity to work through a pseudofunding round complete with an industry mentor and real VC’s.

Who should attend?

The event is open to all. If you are a developer, interested in data use or reuse, a data owner, someone who has an idea for an application using cultural data, a member of a cultural institution, someone who relies on public or private data for your business, an entrepreneur, someone who is passionate about open data or access to culture, someone in education, or someone who has taken part in previous hackdays.

You can sign up for the developer strand, the business strand or as someone with general interest in the subject. And we encourage people to move between the strands.

Why Rewired Culture?

There are lots of great individual initiatives out there – the BBC/British Museum A History of the world in 100 objects is but the latest. But these do tend to be individual initiatives and we want to encourage a wider flowering of cultural data initiatives from a variety of sources – public sector, third sector, entrepreneurs etc.

How much will Rewired Culture cost?

Attendance is free. We will obviously be posting the costs of the initiative itself as part of our commitment to data transparency.