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Initial Idea

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This initial phase seeks to establish how blockchain technologies can improve archives and reposition them as social, democratic entities, rather than hierarchical, institutionally controlled and therefore centralized traditional models.

Bringing together a mix of experts and anchoring the project in the Bosnian National Archive as an initial case study and prototype, this week long think tank will explore ways that block chain strategies can protect and democratize archives for future generations to use in ways more fitting to technologies that are emerging.

Here Sarajevo and Salzburg are linked as catalysts for this project (explained in the background section), but this partnership goes much further than this. We will specifically orientate the think tank towards a response to the recent accidental firebombing of the Bosnian National Archive, developing strategies to protect future archives from such harm.  We will look at how digitization, storage and crowd sourcing data can democratize archive content first, followed by a more thorough development of a strategy that uses decentralized network storage (block chain) to stabilize and protect both the building of and maintenance and distribution of this archive.

At the end of this initiative, we aim to produce a working model through which we will apply for further funding in order to continue the project through to the development of a prototype and then functioning application in the future