PLUGGY, the Pluggable Social Platform for Heritage Awareness and Participation, addresses the need of citizens to be actively involved in cultural heritage activities, not only as observers but also as creators, maintainers and, indeed, major influencers. It provides a novel social platform and a series of smartphone apps that aim at promoting citizens’ active involvement in bringing out their local cultural environment, safeguarding the rich and diverse mosaic of European cultural heritage.
PLUGGY is expected to launch an inventive, Facebook-like social platform as well as a series of Augmented Reality, Geolocation, 3D Sonic and Gaming smartphone apps that will enable citizens across Europe and the world to shape and pass on both individual and collective cultural experiences, thereby enhancing the value of cultural heritage and contributing towards its enrichment. Through PLUGGY’s social platform and by using its innovative curation tools, citizens will be able to act as skilled “storytellers” by creating fascinating personalized stories and sharing them through social networking with friends, associates and professionals. The content will be both crowd-sourced and retrieved from digital collections, allowing users to create links between seemingly unrelated facts, events, people and digitised collections, thus leading to new approaches of presenting cultural resources and to new ways of interacting with them.
PLUGGY’s novel technologies are expected to enable the citizens of Europe, even in its less developed regions, to be actively involved in cultural heritage activities: this will allow a better understanding of their local surroundings and relations with far-away cultures. Through their cooperation and interaction, the users of the PLUGGY social platform and its pluggable applications will be able to develop a common cultural and intellectual perception of European heritage and to participate in the shaping of an overall European cultural landscape.