GLAM/Newsletter/June 2026/Contents/AvoinGLAM report

This Month in GLAM – Volume XVI, Issue VI, June 2026

AvoinGLAM report

Is the sauna still hot?

Sauna & sun

Oulu Löyly was the newest iteration of open cultural heritage -related workshops AvoinGLAM has created. The work started with events organized together with Finnish heritage institutions in the series of Hack4FI – Hack Your Heritage hackathons in 2012–2018.

Covid-19 stopped the 2020 Hack4FI only a day before the launch, giving rise instead to Hack4OpenGLAM online hackathons in the context of the Creative Commons Global Online Summits in 2020–2021.

AI Sauna in 2024 started the current sauna-related tradition. It gathered open knowledge advocates, Wikimedia developers, Finnish cultural heritage institutions and researchers to discuss the effect of AI on open cultural knowledge while also exploring the possibilities offered by it.

Oulu Löyly tapped again to the physical power of sauna and sun to bring people together, this time asking how the heritage of even the smallest and most vulnerable communities can survive and remain accessible in the current technological and political climate.

What went in

These themes and topics nurtured our collaborative work:

Culture as a global public good

Brigitte Vézina
Matti Hakamäki
Sanna Marttila

The underpinning policy question was how culture can be established as a foundational dimension of society. What conditions are needed to ensure that access to cultural heritage, participation in cultural life, and the benefits of knowledge remain open, inclusive, and sustainably safeguarded over time?

Brigitte Vézina (Creative Commons) focused her talk Closing the gap in equitable access to heritage on the barriers that prevent access to public domain heritage online — legal restrictions, paywalls, and cultural heritage laws being misused to extend copyright. She called for international policy action through UNESCO around the Open Heritage Statement, framing openness as a structural principle for cultural heritage governance.

Matti Hakamäki (Finnish Folk Music Institute) in his presentation The Culture Goal – From Necessity to Reality on Culture2030Goal made a complementary argument: that without a dedicated culture goal in the post-2030 UN sustainability framework, other goals on climate, poverty, and social equity cannot be fully achieved, because all of them require shifts in cultural behaviour to succeed.

These perspectives were further grounded in the discussion hosted by Sanna Marttila (IT University of Copenhagen), that drew out practical questions of access, participation, and the responsibilities of institutions, governments, and technology companies toward culture as a public good.

Heritage at risk

Mikael Hiltunen
Jan Ainali
Renata Ávila

Mikael Hiltunen (Hanaholmen) in his keynote presented the Hanaholmen Heritage program and conference, a Nordic–Baltic policy initiative on cultural heritage preparedness in the face of conflict, hybrid threats, and geopolitical disruption. He argued for recognizing cultural heritage as critical infrastructure, expanding digitisation as both a preservation and counter-disinformation tool, and establishing a shared Nordic-Baltic cloud for storing heritage materials.

The framing was extended by Jan Ainali (Wikimedia Sweden) in a discussion connecting preparedness to open infrastructures and volunteer-driven documentation efforts such as Wiki Loves Monuments — and raising the risk that digitization without open licensing simply creates new silos.

The pre-event conversation chaired online by Renata Ávila (Open Knowledge Foundation) echoed similar concerns. It explored the Knowledge as Critical Digital Infrastructure initiative by Open Knowledge Foundation and Wikimedia Foundation, and framed open knowledge and the digital commons as essential infrastructure for democratic resilience in the context of geopolitical instability, platform dependency, and AI-related risks. The discussion is further documented by Renata in Open Knowledge and Critical Infrastructure: a Nordic Conversation.

Sovereign governance of digital heritage

Connor Benedict
Tove Ørsted, Daniel Antal, Deepesha Burse, and Connor Benedict

The panel discussion hosted by Connor Benedict (Content Partnerships Hub) on community resilience opened with examples of heritage brought into the open:

Tove Ørsted (Aalto University) introduced the university’s century of architectural measurement drawings, now digitised and used to rebuild burnt homes and churches.
Daniel Antal (Reprex / Wikimedia Hungary) presented his work connecting Livonian, Udmort, and other small Finno-Ugric communities to materials held about them in Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian collections.
Deepesha Burse (Wikimedia Deutschland) shared her work helping a Nigerian community document election violence on a Wikibase instance.

The panel asked who decides what gets saved — often already determined without communities knowing, with materials sitting in outside institutions, described in foreign languages, and out of reach for those they concern. Visibility alone is not enough: data must be structured, usable, and governable by communities themselves.

On AI, there was broad agreement that generative systems flatten cultural nuance and put under-represented knowledge at particular risk, making community control over reuse, backed by provenance and structured data, the most promising direction on offer.

Sofie Veramme (Werkplaats immaterieel erfgoed) was interviewed for the Oulu Löyly podcast by Niina Holappa ahead of the event. Her core argument is that data about communities must come from those communities, and that people need to understand what happens to their data online — including the ability to change, opt out, or remove it. She references the FAIR and CARE principles as practical frameworks for this, and highlights the tension between the static nature of data and the living, changing nature of intangible heritage. The podcast will be continued and published later this year.

Equipping the cultural commons

Oulu Löyly brought together a set of initiatives around a shared vision: that open, federated infrastructure could form the foundation of a genuine cultural commons, where even small and under-resourced communities can contribute their heritage materials on equal terms. The Open Culture Fair highlighted initiatives ranging from tech to artwork demonstrations and workshops.

Jouni Tuominen (University of Helsinki) presented the ECHOES European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) and the ECHOLOT EU project. Together with Europeana, the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), ECCCH represents Europe's growing infrastructure for discovering, sharing, and collaborating around cultural heritage data — connecting heritage institutions, researchers, and communities across borders.

Deepesha Burse (Wikimedia Deutschland) presented Wikibase and the broader Wikimedia ecosystem — Wikipedia, Wikidata, and Wikimedia Commons — a globally maintained open infrastructure for linked data, images, and knowledge, freely available for anyone to build upon.

The ECHOLOT project brings these two worlds into direct connection through a federated model: institutions and communities can maintain their own interoperable knowledge bases while contributing to a shared network, without surrendering control or depending on a centralised system, and publish simultaneously to Europeana and Wikimedia platforms with provenance and rights metadata embedded.

Jan Ainali offered a live demo of CommonsDB for making the rights status of materials verifiable and trustworthy as they travel across systems.

Johan Kylander presented Finland's national long-term digital preservation services at CSC — Finland's IT Center for Science. Such infrastructure represents a further opportunity for communities: the computing capacity for sovereign, community-accessible hosting already exists, but bringing it within reach of smaller actors requires political willingness to fund it as shared public infrastructure.

Beyond the infrastructure initiatives, the Open Culture Fair also featured a rich mix of projects, workshops, and demonstrations. Connor Benedict presented the Wikimedia Content Partnerships Hub. Vertti Luostarinen showed Layers in the Peace Machine, an immersive installation at Oulu City Hall using open-source AI and community memories. Lù Chén shared her work pluralising the Nokia Design Archive through social remembering. Hanna Sipos facilitated a workshop on the valuation of AI art. Ewen Chardronnet presented Makery's publications on art, science, and technology. Andrew Paterson hosted the first in-person meeting of the Open Latitudes network, and Matti Hakamäki conducted a hands-on session on Culture as Sustainable Development Goal 18.

North is OK

Oulu Löyly brought new energy to Nordic and Baltic collaboration. It marked the launch of OK North, a new initiative bringing together open knowledge organizations from Finland, Denmark, Norway, Estonia, and Sweden to collaborate and share resources.

The event also coincided with the Wikimedia Northern Europe Meeting 2026, and brought the participants together for a joint webinar and meetup.

To top it all off, at the opening of Oulu Löyly, Wikimedia Finland announced that Finnish Wikipedians had been honored with the State Award for Public Information. Congratulations, Finnish Wikipedia!

👉 Read the Finland report about the Northern Europe Wikimedia meetup.

Sauna raft Kesän sauna at the Oulu Sauna Festival

Think & do with mind & body

The first day of the Open Culture Fair with talks, demos and workshops concluded at the Oulu Sauna Festival where more than ten temporary saunas lined the Oulu River.

The sunny Northern evening featured a rich program of activities, including Naked Truth sauna dialogues, a format that combines the friendly, equal, and respectful atmosphere of the sauna with the Erätauko method for constructive dialogue. The format was envisioned for Tartu's European Capital of Culture program in 2025 as a Finnish-Estonian collaboration.

What came out

Next morning, the participants of the Think & Do organized in groups based on shared concerns about heritage at risk. Each group then worked to agree on a shared mission statement and agreed on the output.

The Oral-to-Written project addressed how fluent speakers of Saami and other under-resourced languages can contribute knowledge without needing to be fluent writers, surfacing language trauma, trust, and technical barriers as equally important as infrastructure.

The May the Source Be With You group took up the reuse question directly, proposing transparency mechanisms — provenance, attribution, and bot identification — so that communities and institutions can trace how their openly shared materials are used, including by AI systems. Open cultural heritage depends on infrastructure that communities can actually use.

The SPECS for Low-Tech Infra for Communities project examined how small community organizations can build and sustain archives with low-cost, low-threshold tools — mapping practical “slots” of infrastructure rather than imposing institutional systems.

The ORLA — the Open Resource & Learning Assistant group created a self-assessment tool to help institutions identify their next steps toward open access. The working prototype was built using Claude.

ORLA combines the self-assessment tool with an AI-powered bot that guides users toward relevant resources and can help generate a project plan for moving from closed to open collections. The self-assessment works independently without additional services, while the bot requires an API key. Both are available on GitHub.

Open Latitudes is an ongoing one-year transdisciplinary network exploring solar-human relations across the Nordic and Baltic region, connected to the Liepāja 2027 European Capital of Culture program. The network brings together organizations working with local archives, community art, open knowledge, and environmental themes — including Pikene på Brøn from Norway, Imagining Godzilla from Finland, Makery from France, and a knitwear design project by Kerolaina Bula from Latvia. The case example at Oulu Löyly asked how open knowledge and heritage can be part of contemporary and hybrid arts production, with each partner exploring connections to Wikimedia platforms and Creative Commons licensing.

May the Source Be With You implementation journey
What? – So what? – Now what?
SPECS for Low-Tech Infra for Communities documentation
ORLA questionnaire

Our recommendations

We have pulled together a set of recommendations that are hosted in the original version of the blog post in the Open Knowledge Finland blog. They encapsulate what was discussed but may be refined over time to better reflect all discussions.

🛡️ Treat open knowledge as critical infrastructure

📚 Support culture and heritage in order to nurture resilient societies

🤝 Build sustained translocal cooperation

🕸️ Design federated, interoperable knowledge systems

☁️ Invest in sovereign, open cloud infrastructure

📝 Secure heritage custodians flexible reuse rights

⚖️ Strengthen culture's place in global policy

Documentation

All presentations and work is documented on the Documentation page. It includes

Talks and discussions with links to presentations and recordings. The captions of the recordings have been proofread, so they can be watched in other languages as well.
Think & Do projects with links to slides, recordings of the presentation, project pages on wiki and additional resources.
The recordings are published on AvoinGLAM’s YouTube channel. Subscribe to stay updated!
Openly licensed photos may be added to the joint Google photo album or a Wikimedia Commons category.
The Pinboard and the podcast are works-in-progress. There was not enough time to create a representative collection of works highlighting these questions on the Pinboard or interview enough people to produce the podcast series. We intend to continue work with them outside the event documentation. They will be linked from the Documentation page when the time is right, and the podcast videos will feature on AvoinGLAM’s YouTube page.

Thank you!

Oulu Löyly was organized by AvoinGLAM and Open Knowledge Finland in partnership with Creative Commons, Wikimedia Finland, Wikimedia Eesti, Wikimedia Sverige, Wikitongues, and Anarâškielâ servi.

Special shoutout to the team who made the event happen: Sophea, Juliaana, Niina, Joy, Liisi, Marja, Tea, Teemu, Tochi, Tove, and Susanna and the Oulu2026 volunteers!

The Nordic Council of Ministers supports the OK North network initiative and its partners OpenDenmark, Creative Commons Norway, Open Knowledge Estonia, Open Knowledge Sweden ja Creative Commons Sweden from the Demos program.

Thank you for collaboration, Open Knowledge Foundation, Oulu Central Library Saari, Oulu Sauna Festival, Cafe Tarina, Luckan Uleåborg and Green Soul Catering.

The event was made possible with support from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Oulu Löyly was part of the official program of Oulu2026 – Cultural Capital of Europe and the International Archives Week.

#oululoyly #oululöyly #oulu2026 #IAW2026

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