Cultural institutions have learned how to invite. They request stories, images, maps, testimonies, objects and time from communities. The process may produce valuable relationships, alter an exhibition or open an archive. Upon conclusion, the institution retains recordings, photographs, contacts, metadata, methodologies and public legitimacy. Those who participated rarely retain the same control over that which they helped to produce.
Inequality does not invalidate all participatory practice. It necessitates looking beyond the encounter. Power manifests in what can be modified during the project and in what occurs subsequently with the materials.
Participation is not governance
“Participatory” denotes highly varied practices. In 1969, Sherry Arnstein proposed an eight-rung ladder for citizen participation in urban planning, ranging from manipulation to citizen control, and warned that participation without the redistribution of power is an empty ritual. For a cultural project, four levels suffice:
- Access: entering, attending or utilising a resource.
- Contribution: providing materials, opinions or labour.
- Decision: modifying content, criteria, schedule or budget.
- Governance: intervening continuously in rules, archiving and reuse.
A consultation may listen without transferring decision-making power. A workshop may provide a voice without affecting the budget. A co-creation may enrich the institution and maintain those who participate as a beneficiary audience. If the four levels are named in the same manner, an organised extraction of knowledge may be presented as a distribution of power.
The most rigorous criterion is not how many people were invited, but what they were able to change and what they were able to prevent. Governance includes the possibility of limiting digitisation, conditioning licences, demanding withdrawal or refusing for a testimony to be reused as evidence of impact.
From encounter to institutional asset
A conversation recorded for an exhibition enters a repository. A photograph taken in a workshop reappears in a campaign. A community story is incorporated into a grant report. A methodology is presented at a conference. What is produced exceeds the initial purpose and continues to work for someone.
The institution possesses the infrastructure to preserve, describe, relate and reuse. Participants may receive a copy, but not necessarily the tools to locate it years later, correct its metadata or understand new uses. This difference converts a temporary collaboration into institutional accumulation.
The archive is not the residue of participation. It is a second phase of the project. There, it is decided:
- What is preserved and what is eliminated.
- Who appears as author, source or participant.
- What words describe the material.
- Who may view, download or reuse it.
- What licences are applied.
- How long it remains accessible.
- Who may correct or withdraw it.
Each decision produces visibility and silence.
Opening does not always repair
Digitisation is often presented as a neutral expansion of access. It may repair exclusions, reunite dispersed archives and permit educational uses. It may also transfer materials to contexts that those who produced them did not foresee.
The FAIR principles, published in 2016, promote findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data. They are useful for avoiding incomprehensible or technically closed archives. The CARE principles, developed from Indigenous data governance, add collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics. The relationship between both frameworks is not resolved by choosing openness or closure. It requires asking who defines reuse and who receives its benefits.
Mukurtu, a free content management system developed with indigenous communities, permits cultural protocols and differentiated access levels. Its interest does not lie in offering a universal solution, but in demonstrating that a digital archive may incorporate community rules instead of treating all material as equally available.
Local Contexts, an initiative emerging from that same sphere, offers traditional knowledge and biocultural labels that a community may associate with a digital record. They do not replace a licence nor do they have their own legal force. They inform of protocols for use, provenance and responsibilities that a standard licence does not express, and allow that information to travel with the material when it leaves the original archive.
Some content requires open access. Other content requires restriction, consultation, specific attribution, renewed consent or the capacity for withdrawal. "Open" describes a technical condition; it does not guarantee justice.
An ongoing European problem
DIGICHer, a Horizon Europe project active between February 2024 and January 2027, investigates the digitisation of minority community heritage through pilots linked to Sámi, Jewish and Ladin heritage in the Dolomites. Its budget amounts to 3,899,812.50 euros. The project has published partial deliverables on practices, education, communication, sustainability and ethical management. Its final recommendations were not available at the time of writing.
Prudence is essential. An ongoing project may demonstrate methods and tensions, yet it should not be cited as if it had already resolved the community governance of digital heritage. Its final results must be evaluated by the decisions they enable, not merely by the number of resources produced.
Image, voice and personal data
In Spain, an initial authorisation does not render any future reuse lawful.
Organic Law 1/1982 protects honour, privacy, and one's own image. Consent is revocable, although revocation may generate an obligation to indemnify for damages, including justified expectations. Application depends on the material, the use, the context, and legal exceptions.
The GDPR and Organic Law 3/2018 apply when testimonies, images, voices, contacts, or combinations of data identify an individual. The institution requires a legal basis, clear information, purpose, and retention periods. Reusing data for communication, research, or system training is not automatically covered simply because the data was collected within a cultural project.
Consent in data protection must not be confused with an assignment of rights or with authorisation regarding one's own image. A single form may contain several decisions, yet it must distinguish between them and allow for an understanding of what is being accepted.
Three rules profoundly affect participatory archives. Article 89 of the GDPR permits the processing of data for archival purposes in the public interest, for scientific or historical research, or for statistical purposes, with safeguards such as minimisation or pseudonymisation, and Article 17.3(d) limits the right to erasure when deleting the data would render impossible or seriously impair those objectives. In Spain, Article 26 of Organic Law 3/2018 regulates processing for archival purposes in the public interest by public administrations. The practical consequence is an inference of my own: a public institution may invoke the archival interest to retain material that a participant might wish to withdraw, and for this reason, withdrawal must be agreed upon beforehand, with clarity regarding what falls outside its scope.
Minors require specific care. Organic Law 3/2018 sets the age of consent for the processing of one's own data at fourteen, and Organic Law 1/1982 requires, for the image of a minor lacking sufficient maturity, the consent of their legal representatives with prior notification to the Public Prosecutor's Office. A photographed and archived school workshop is not a minor matter.
The deceased also count. Organic Law 3/2018 allows family members and heirs to request access, rectification, or suppression of their data, unless the individual has prohibited it, and Organic Law 1/1982 provides for the protection of their memory. An oral history archive collected today will tomorrow contain testimonies from individuals who will no longer be able to decide upon them.
The archive may also include data of third parties mentioned in a narrative. The intent of the person providing a testimony does not negate the rights of those who appear within it.
Authorship and licensing
An interview, photograph, drawing, text or composition contributed during a process may be protected if they meet the requirements of originality. Authorship belongs to the creator, barring specific rules, and exploitation requires an appropriate basis. Not every phrase or piece of data constitutes a work, nor does every contribution generate copyright. The decision must be made on a case-by-case basis.
The institution should separate:
- Ownership of the physical medium.
- Rights over the content.
- Authorisation for image or voice.
- Processing of personal data.
- Licensing for specific uses.
- Right to credit or anonymity.
Receiving an object or file is not equivalent to receiving all rights. Publishing it once does not authorise any future reuse.
A use no one foresaw: training
Many participation agreements signed ten years ago did not contemplate that a digitised archive could be used to train artificial intelligence systems. It is now a possible use. Directive (EU) 2019/790 permits text and data mining on lawfully accessible content, unless the rights holder has expressly reserved this use in an appropriate manner; for content published online, by machine-readable means.
For an institution, this presents a decision it cannot make alone. Declaring or not declaring this reservation regarding materials contributed by a community affects those who produced them. My proposal: incorporate it into the agreement as a separate authorisation, with a default option that does not authorise training, and document the reservation within the repository itself. The connection to Value without an author is not surplus is direct: the materials of a community archive may end up condensed into an external performance without anyone having decided so.
Heritage and community
Spain deposited the instrument of ratification for the Faro Convention on 7 April 2022, and the convention entered into force for Spain on 1 August. The text understands the heritage community as a group of people who value specific aspects of heritage and wish to sustain and transmit them.
It is a framework convention and does not offer a detailed procedure for every participatory archive. Its relevance lies in shifting the focus: individuals are not merely sources of content for an institution. They may constitute communities with a legitimate interest in how that heritage is defined, managed and transmitted.
An agreement before beginning
I have not located a single institutional model that simultaneously regulates ownership, withdrawal, licensing, data, remuneration and governance. A minimum agreement should specify:
- Purpose of the project and planned materials.
- Open decisions and already closed decisions.
- Remuneration, expenses and support.
- Credits, pseudonyms or anonymity.
- Who holds custody and for how long.
- Access retained by each participant.
- Permitted uses and uses requiring new authorisation.
- Publication, licensing and download.
- Correction, embargo and withdrawal.
- Processing of images, voice and data.
- Transfer if the institution closes, merges or changes ownership.
- Communication of results and disagreements.
- Periodic review of decisions.
The agreement must be comprehensible and offer separate decisions. An individual may agree to participate while declining to have their image used for promotional purposes. They may authorise a restricted archive but not an open publication. They may request credit for a work while remaining anonymous in evaluation data.
Remuneration without purchasing silence
Paying for contributions acknowledges time and expertise. This must not become a total purchase of rights or a waiver of the right to contest future uses. Remuneration for work, reimbursement of expenses, and consideration for licences are three distinct concepts and must be itemised separately.
Institutions must ensure that unpaid participation does not replace professional employment or offload mediation, research, and documentation functions onto invited communities. The relationship with La rampa no basta is direct: consulting on accessibility without remuneration converts lived experience into a free institutional resource.
After the closure
The project should conclude with a verifiable handover:
- A copy of the agreed materials.
- An inventory of what has been preserved.
- Location, access conditions, and the responsible party.
- Definitive credits.
- Uses undertaken and those anticipated.
- Review period.
- Channel for corrections or withdrawal.
- Explanation of recommendations accepted and rejected.
The institution must also record what it has obtained: contacts, methodology, reputation, data, content, and learning. Without such accounting, only what the community received becomes visible.
The participatory event concludes, but its materials continue to act. The archive is the site where it is decided who continues to speak once the encounter has ended. For this reason, it cannot be treated as a technical residue.
On the open conversation
If you work with community archives or participatory processes and are aware of public models that combine governance, withdrawal, licensing, and remuneration, you may write to me.
Sources
- DIGICHer on CORDIS.
- DIGICHer, deliverables.
- FAIR Principles.
- CARE Principles.
- Mukurtu.
- Local Contexts.
- Sherry R. Arnstein, “A Ladder of Citizen Participation”, Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 1969. Reference without verified link.
- Directive (EU) 2019/790, on copyright in the Digital Single Market.
- Organic Law 1/1982.
- General Data Protection Regulation.
- Organic Law 3/2018.
- Consolidated Text of the Intellectual Property Law.
- Faro Convention, status of signatures and ratifications.