OpenCulturas

Arts + culture portal software for regional marketing and digital souvereignty

OpenCulturas is built as a pre-configured platform for cultural-focused communities, empowering actors in the cultural field to own their data and make their information accessible to a wide audience.

How do I download OpenCulturas?

composer create-project --remove-vcs drupal/openculturas_project example.org

For contributions, get the source at OpenCulturas Project page.

Any facet of an arts + culture community, infinitely interconnectable

• Calendar: Add event dates and list them in a filterable event calendar (plus map)
• Locations: Create event locations that can be referenced and are aggregated on a map
• Personal Profiles: Create your profile and showcase your information
• Group Profiles: Create a profile for your group, such as a band, performance group or theatre ensemble
• Magazine: Publish magazine articles on spotlight topics, such as artist interviews or concert reviews
• Event Catalogue: Re-usable event (or workshop) descriptions, displayed in a catalogue with search filters
• Tagging in many dimensions, each tag automatically comes with a promotable landing page

Discover more

Features

• Filterable overviews for all types (locations on a map, calendar, profiles overview, magazine
• Category pages aggregate context-filtered content
• Pre-configured "related content" blocks, e. g. a calendar related to a location/profile, connections to artist/ensemble profiles, referencing magazine articles
• Hierarchically structured taxonomies like focus categories, accessibility features, trigger warnings
• Interaction options like bookmark links for individual watchlists, public recommendations
• Review workflows
• Focus on user-generated content, with moderation workflows, abuse flags etc.

Many more features

Based on repeating usability tests, there are yet more features on the roadmap.

Beyond the arts

With a strength in network visualization, event dates, multi-profile relations, and geolocalization, OpenCulturas has proven to be suitable, too, for

• FOSS community platforms (e. g. easy publication of repeating events, foster networking)
• Umbrella organizations (e. g. promoting a decentralized user-generated network, publishing press releases)
• Associations maintaining e. g. memorial sites all over the country

...and many more use cases.

Beginner-friendly

OpenCulturas focuses on the early part of the notorious Drupal learning curve. The mantra is: site-builder friendly. It was a deliberate decision to not solve in code what can be solved in the back-end. With this strategy we want to encourage Drupal beginners to take their first steps.

Design adjustments do not require speed studies of Twig or PostCSS. Web designers can adjust a handful of CSS custom properties to give their platform a unique look. There are a lot more custom properties available that work based on sensible color mixes or calculations but all of those can in principle be overridden via a CSS injector.

Built-in compliance

Typical projects are funded by the European public sector. Hence, OpenCulturas was built on compliant standards:

• Privacy by default (no tracking 3rd-party required)
• Accessibility by design (screen reader and keyboard accessible as well as structured data for accessibility features related to events + locations)
• Security-savvy development
• Truly Free and Open Source
• Software bill of materials available

Governance

Following what we've learned from FOSS communities, the distribution is not "owned" by a vendor. Instead, the OpenCulturas Association invites site-owners and cultural organizations to decide about further development and use their budgets in union.