Looking back at Oulu Löyly

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Oulu Löyly Think & Do Fest was organized in Oulu 8–10 June, 2026. It brought together an international mix of open culture advocates, cultural heritage practitioners, researchers and policy makers in Oulu during the near-midnight light of the Nordic summer. Together we explored how cultural heritage can remain a shared resource in a time of accelerating technological, environmental and geopolitical change.

What went in

The themes and topics that nurtured our collaborative work:

Culture as a global public good

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 (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, OKFN) echoed similar concerns. It explored the Knowledge as Critical Digital Infrastructure initiative by OKFN and the 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

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 Heritage at Risk podcast by Niina Holappa ahead of Oulu Löyly. 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.

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.

Europeana, the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, and the ECHOES European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) together form Europe’s primary infrastructure for discovering, sharing, and collaborating around cultural heritage data. Alongside this, the Wikimedia ecosystem — Wikipedia, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikibase — offers 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 centralized system. They can publish simultaneously to Europeana and Wikimedia platforms with provenance and rights metadata embedded. CommonsDB supports this by making the rights status of materials verifiable and trustworthy as they travel across systems. CSC — Finland’s IT Center for Science represents a further opportunity: 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.

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 coordinated by Sanna Marttila in 2012–2018.

Covid-19 stopped the 2020 Hack4FI only a day before the launch, which gave birth 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. AI Sauna 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 cultural heritage can survive and remain accessible for even the smallest and most vulnerable communities in the current technological and political climate.

What came out

Think & do with mind & body

Oulu Löyly opened with the Open Culture Fair, where participants shared projects through talks, demos, and workshops. The day concluded at the Oulu Sauna Festival, where more than ten temporary saunas along the Oulu River kept conversations going late into the bright summer evening.

The collaborative work of the Think & Do started with introductions built on the connections formed on the previous day. Each participant wrote their core concern about heritage at risk on a piece of paper in block letters and had one minute to introduce themselves and the concern.

Groups were formed organically as the participants joined others who shared similar concerns. Each group then worked to agree on a shared mission statement. If they could not reach consensus, they were encouraged to split and continue as separate tracks.

The groups started working on their collaborative projects with a clear instruction to produce a concrete output or “product” of their work. This phase continued into the early evening and shifted into more casual discussions towards the day’s end.

On the morning of the last day, the groups refined their outputs and documented them on wiki pages and in a shared slide deck. Each group presented their work in a streamed session. The workshop concluded with a final discussion held offline.

Think & Do projects

Communities need meaningful ways to govern how their knowledge is documented, shared, and reused — a challenge that became concrete in discussions on language revitalization. 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.

Our recommendations

Treat open knowledge as critical infrastructure — Governments and institutions should formally recognize cultural heritage and open knowledge systems as critical digital infrastructure — as essential to democratic resilience as energy or transport networks, and equally exposed to geopolitical, platform, and AI-related risks.

Invest in the full spectrum of heritage preservation — proactive documentation and digitisation should be standard practice rather than a crisis response, and technology is only as effective as the people behind it. The contributions of volunteers, communities, and cultural practitioners all deserve recognition and sustained support to help keep living traditions alive. 

Establish permanent cross-border cooperation structures — Establish permanent cross-border cooperation structures — regional bodies should develop common preparedness guidelines and mutual assistance protocols, complemented by civil society and open knowledge networks operating at the same scale. These regional efforts gain force when connected to global frameworks and international institutions.

Build interoperable, federated knowledge systems — institutions should adopt federated models that allow distributed stewardship while enabling shared discovery and reuse, rather than centralizing data. Publicly co-financed regional cloud infrastructure, built on federated and open principles, would give communities a practical and sovereign alternative to commercial platforms for storing and stewarding their heritage materials. Heritage stewards need stronger and more nuanced means to determine the terms of reuse, supported by clear provenance, attribution, and governance information that travels with the material.

Advance global policy frameworks for culture and heritage — culture and heritage should be structurally recognised in international policy, both as a domain of open access rights through initiatives like the Open Heritage Statement and as a foundational pillar of sustainable development through the proposed Culture2030Goal.

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.
  • 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.

What’s next?

Keep in contact!

Let’s work together!

on projects that tackle heritage at risk and strengthen the cultural commons.

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, Tove, Tea, Juliaana, Niina, Joy, Liisi, Marja, Teemu, Tochi, 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.

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