About Us

Find Ideas. Find People. Find Money. Find Events. Find Debates.
One website, 50 countries, 5 languages.

It’s never been easier to know about everything that’s happening across Europe in arts and culture. LabforCulture develops innovative approaches, tools and technologies to strengthen, stimulate and facilitate cultural collaboration across geographic, cultural and imaginative borders.

We work with and for artists, arts and culture organisations and networks, cultural professionals and audiences in the 50 countries of Europe, as well as providing a platform for cultural cooperation between Europe and the rest of the world.

Our mission is both to ensure that all those working on cultural collaboration have access to up-to-the-minute information and to encourage the cultural sector to become more experimental with online technologies.

LabforCulture provides services to artists, cultural managers, producers, programmers, researchers and policy-makers.

We provide:

• Information, research and analysis related to cultural cooperation and collaboration, including funding opportunities, critical perspectives, research, news, and contacts (organisations and networks).
• Online networking tools to enable and strengthen the capacity for cultural collaboration within the cultural sector.
• Promotion of the players engaged in cultural cooperation and their activities across Europe and beyond.
• Spaces for connections, exchanges and knowledge sharing between organisations and individuals.
• Platforms for discussion and discourse on current issues affecting the cultural sector.

Background

LabforCulture is an autonomous project initiated in 2004 and hosted by the European Cultural Foundation (ECF) in Amsterdam.

Evidence showed that information on cultural cooperation across borders was difficult to access. This was specifically highlighted in the Ruffolo Report on cultural cooperation in the European Union, commissioned by the European Parliament in 2001. Research carried out by the European Commission, European think tanks and the ECF confirmed that an online platform was needed to promote online participation and debate. LabforCulture.org was developed in partnership with key European cultural networks and organisations to fill this gap.

After an intensive testing period involving cultural practitioners from a wide variety of backgrounds and locations across Europe, the site went live in the summer of 2006. Since then, tens of thousands of visitors have arrived from every region across the broader Europe and beyond, with the number of registered users on the site tripled since the site launch with thousands of postings of resources, organisations and relevant documents submitted to the site.

The LabforCulture website is developed using open source software. All content on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Gateway to Cultural Cooperation (G2CC) Project (2004-2006)

The Gateway to Cultural Cooperation (G2CC) project, supported by the European Union - Directorate General for Education and Culture (Dec. 2004 - Dec. 2006), provided the first content and technical framework in the implementation of LabforCulture.org. The G2CC project was run for two years as an active partnership between the four co-organisers: European Cultural Foundation (ECF), ERICarts Institute, Fitzcarraldo Foundation, and On-the-Move Association, as well as with 14 associated partners. Read more in the background paper “European Cultural Co-operation in the G2CC-LAB-Environment”.