Pieter-Jan Pauwels

Pieter-Jan is an innovation lead at District09, the IT-government agency for the City of Ghent in Belgium. His role is to help build bridges between civil servants and tech people, to experiment and collaborate on challenges, before they turn into digital solutions. His focus today is on the project "the collections of Ghent", where he is one of the strategic coordinators. CoGhent is a three year EU-granted Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) project of the City of Ghent, focused on digitally opening up cultural heritage data and cultural production to everyone and uses the result as a backbone to create an immersive and inclusive experience room, called the CoGent box. This physical space will travel to three diverse neighbourhoods in Ghent. There, citizens will be able to access, use, and add onto the context-sensitive, query-based digital content from the cultural heritage collection, and share stories and objects from fellow citizens through immersive, interactive, storytelling and participatory activities.