As you probably might know, I love old houses. I love to unearth the little secrets hidden in a house, explore how it was built, the materials used and of course, I love to restore it. It was obvious to create a European project out of this love and so I did. I wrote down the idea and searched for partners in Europe who might be interested in doing that project. We are a great team with very interesting people: an expert who is responsible for the plaster restoration of the Alhambra in Granada, a director of the biggest school complex in Ankara, someone who is specialized in laser scanning buildings (and boats) for restoration projects, vocational educational providers, a university which aims to educate managers in cultural heritage.
The first time we applied, which was two years ago, we failed. We were not precise enough in terms of the educational benefits. But we did not abandon the idea and started re-writing the proposal. The whole time doing that I was thinking of how I would write a business strategy and that pattern I laid over the application form requests. Isabell helped me to find the right words and we got it!
We begin this project in November and the result will be a digital repository of old houses which are homes today. That repository will contain the social history, architectural styles, attributes of the used materials. On top, we will have little online courses, where people can learn restoring techniques. Experts in the fields of house building and protection will support local people in collecting these information.
It’s not a cakewalk to organize and manage such a project with institutions from seven European countries, but thanks to the Internet, it’s easier. We use Development Seed’s Open Atrium platform for that, as we use that environment also to manage the task of our clients. Configured in a good way, according to the level of our users, that platform is intuitive to use even for those, who are not working every day in such a way.