Javi Buron , Creatives in Limerick
Last week saw the launch of Creatives in Limerick, a web app aiming to harness the immense potential of Limerick’s blossoming artistic and cultural movement. Javier from the project took a little time to chat with Soapbox.
Can you tell us a bit about yourselves?
We are Colaborativa.eu a design, technology and social action agency based in Córdoba, Spain. Magda Sanchez is a software and electronic engineer and I am an architect myself. We develop a wide range of creative projects, from the reactivation of abandoned public buildings to citywide events based on citizens participation. We love technology in its widest sense and we combine it with design thinking in our everyday practice.
What’s the overall aim of the project?
How did it all begin?
Where have your group operated before?
There are four cities using the tool, Pescara in Italy, Navarra in the north of Spain, Cordoba in the south and now Limerick! All these collaborations have happened by chance when we have met creatives from these cities. The project is consciously designed to discourage anyone with a financial interest in gathering this information so we don’t expect exponential growth or any of the buzzwords used in commercial web applications, and it’s perfectly fine for us!
What do these places have in common?
All of them could be included in the category of mid sized cities by each country standards. We believe that this
happens because mid sized cities are small enough to generate a single cultural scene where not everybody knows each other. There will be multiple and often complete unrelated scenes happening at the same time in big and mid sized cities. However in smaller cities everybody will know the rest so this type of tools are not really necessary.
What impact do you feel it’s had on other locations in the past?
What was it about the “creatives” in Limerick that caught your attention?
The response to the website has been fantastic, what’s the next step for Limerick?
Creativeinlimerick.com has been designed to do just one thing: map and visualize the local creative sector. It is a non-for-profit project and because of that we carefully control the amount of time that we spend on the project to make sure that we can maintain it in the long term, we spend most of the time fixing bugs, improving the UI and code and assisting whoever wants to use it in their own local community. If people wants to build other tools on top of ours is fine, all the information (except the creative’s email which is strictly private) is available in machine readable formats and published under a open data license.
How can people get involved?
Where’s the next city on your plan?
Who knows, the tool expansion is based on pure serendipity, maybe the home city of one of your readers will be the next one!
You can keep up to date with Colaborativa by following @colaborativaeu on twitter.
