ECHOES hosts its Second Annual Meeting: Research, Innovation, and European Collaboration

The second ECHOES Annual Meeting has just come to a close, after turning the city of Poznań, Poland, into a vibrant hub of European innovation for Digital Cultural Heritage.

The event, held from March 16 to 20 at the National Museum, brought together European institutions, sector stakeholders, partners, and sister projects for four days of intense exchange between the business, institutional, and academic worlds around the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.

The meeting placed the major challenges facing the ECCCH back at the center of the discussion: how to design a flexible infrastructure, make applications truly useful for the heritage sector, build governance that connects a wide range of actors, and ensure long-term sustainability. Significant attention was also given to interoperability, structured knowledge, and multilingualism, as well as to impact models and the ability to measure the results of capacity-building activities in a clear and meaningful way.

The public day at the National Museum in Poznań on Wednesday opened the discussion to a wider audience. The European Commission, institutional representatives, sister projects, and local stakeholders exchanged views on concrete use cases, the current state of the Cloud, and the future development of the ECCCH ecosystem. Held in a hybrid format, the event showed how the Cultural Heritage Cloud can become a shared tool for research, preservation, and the promotion of heritage.

Beyond the formal sessions, the meeting also provided an important setting for networking and operational collaboration among projects linked to the ECCCH pathway. Task forces, coordinators, and boards worked in parallel on topics such as ontologies, federated authentication, and service integration, building synergies that extend beyond individual initiatives.

Overall, the second ECHOES Annual Meeting stood out not only as a reporting milestone, but also as a concrete step toward a more connected, open, and shared European digital cultural heritage infrastructure.