ECHOES Consultation
Be Part of the ECHOES Cultural Heritage Cloud Initiative
To ensure that the Cultural Heritage Cloud meets the real-world requirements of the communities it is intended to serve, ECHOES launched a comprehensive community consultation across the European Cultural Heritage sector.
The ECHOES consultation pursued three main objectives:
- To identify and map the diverse communities working on or with cultural heritage, supporting the development of the ECHOES Atlas of Communities and helping to build a stronger and more connected user community around the future Cloud.
- To understand the digital practices, needs and levels of digital literacy of these communities, providing evidence to inform the design of Cloud services, tools, training and capacity-building activities.
- To capture the expectations of future users regarding the Cloud, ensuring that stakeholders could actively contribute their perspectives and help shape the development of a user-centred infrastructure.
The consultation consisted of an online questionnaire, open between February and July 2025, complemented by follow-up workshops, focus groups and interviews. Together, these activities generated a rich evidence base on the characteristics, needs and expectations of the European Cultural Heritage Community.
The first results of the consultation are now available through a range of resources, including factsheets, interactive dashboards, analytical reports, cluster profile analyses and interactive exploration tools.
Consultation Factsheet
The Consultation Factsheet provides a concise overview of the consultation process and its key findings. It presents headline figures, major trends and key messages emerging from the responses collected across the European Cultural Heritage Community.
The factsheet is intended as a quick entry point for readers seeking an accessible summary of the consultation outcomes.
Interactive Dashboard
The Interactive Dashboard offers a visual exploration of the consultation dataset through charts, indicators and filters. Users can navigate the results, explore response distributions and examine trends across different thematic areas.
The dashboard provides an accessible way to engage with the consultation data and complements the more detailed analytical outputs.
Consultation Analysis Report
Deliverable D4.1 presents the full analysis of the consultation results. The report examines users’ practices, challenges, expectations and requirements regarding data creation, management, sharing, digital tools, infrastructures and collaboration.
Drawing on responses from across the European Cultural Heritage Community, the report provides an evidence-based understanding of current needs and priorities and establishes a foundation for the design and development of future Cultural Heritage Cloud services.
Cluster Profiles Analysis
The Cluster Profiles Analysis, published as an annex to Deliverable D4.1, provides an in-depth examination of the community profiles identified through the consultation analysis.
Rather than representing fixed categories, the profiles provide analytical perspectives on the diversity of communities participating in the consultation. They support the development of the ECHOES Atlas of Communities and contribute to the identification of user requirements, engagement strategies and capacity-building priorities.
Interactive Analysis Applications
To facilitate the exploration of consultation findings, ECHOES provides a set of interactive analysis applications that complement the published reports.
The applications allow users to investigate the consultation data from different perspectives:
- Profile Analysis, which explores the cluster profiles identified through the consultation analysis, providing access to profile-specific findings, comparative analyses and visualisations.
- Occupation Analysis, which enables the exploration of responses according to occupational categories, supporting comparisons between professional groups and stakeholder communities.
Together, these applications offer a dynamic environment for analysing the consultation dataset, discovering patterns across different user communities and examining key dimensions such as digital maturity, governance, infrastructure and collaboration.
Who can contribute?
-
Develop a strategy for community building,
-
Inform the design and technological framework of the Cloud,
-
Identify additional stakeholders eager to contribute,
-
Initiate collaborative activities within the community,
-
Prepare new capacity-building initiatives for the next phases of the project.
Workshops & Focus Groups
ECHOES Consultation completed
The publication of the ECHOES Report on identification of communities and their needs concludes the ECHOES Consultation. A booklet presenting the main results of the Consultation and the community-building strategy will be available soon. [...]
Online Focus Group for Networks and Umbrella Organisations
An online focus group hosting representatives of ECHOES networks and umbrella organisation was held on the 8th April 11:00-13:00 CET. It gathered participants from the following networks/umbrella organisations: APEF [...]
ECHOES Baltics & Nordics Event at the NEMO Annual Conference
The ECHOES event 'The Cultural Heritage Cloud regional meeting - Connecting to the Baltics and Nordics' on developing a European digital cloud for cultural heritage will be held on the 14th October, the day [...]
ECHOES Webinar for Portuguese-Speaking Cultural Heritage Institutions
ECHOES invites Portuguese-speaking Cultural Heritage Institutions to participate in the webinar on the 16th June 2026. The ECHOES – European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science project is pleased to invite you to participate in [...]
INP Focus Group for curators, art historians and conservator-restorers
At the end of March the INP hosted a focus group organised by the ECHOES project, bringing together curators, art historians, and conservator-restorers. The event gathered heritage professionals and researchers from across Europe. [...]
ECHOES Consultation Preliminary Results published
We are pleased to announce that the preliminary results of the ECHOES Consultation are now available! The Consultation started with a survey conducted between February and July 2025, which engaged with over 2,000 participants [...]
