The seeds of inspiration around creating a heritage project were sewn just over a year ago when The African Commons Project held an iHeritage event at a local shopping mall in Jozi on Heritage Day, with the aim of encouraging South Africans to share their stories, pictures and memories. The day made us realise a couple of obvious, yet often-overlooked things: firstly, that our heritage is not a simple storybook of linear national milestones but rather a mish-mash scrapbook of faces and places we hold dear; things that have changed our lives; or events and people who have made us proud of who we. Secondly, our heritage should be shared with others to make real the uniting and enlightening power of those memories.

As part of the Ford-Foundation funded project entitled Local Context, Global Commons, an intrepid group of African Commons Project workers and volunteers are working towards finding ways to showcase, unite, share and preserve out local culture and heritage. The project is called iHeritage. This objective fits well with the general project which highlights ‘the local’ and in particular, and with one specific area which is to develop an open cultural heritage platform called Open Contexts, in order to

provide easy-to-use tools for cultural institutions to document their collections integrate these with content from other organisations syndicate their content across the Web.

As for iHeritage, keep checking back to the iHeritage blog to see what exciting venture our group are undertaking!:

We’ll be announcing some pretty cool collaborative projects in 2009 which include: Flickr photo walks, a project inspired by the Flickr photo commons which will enable Jozi museums and heritage sites to collaborate, online heritage software demos with the Alexandria Archive Institute and online copyright seminars for heritage institutions (among others!)