DigVentures
DigVentures Trench 5 at Leiston Abbey, 2013
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| Industry | Heritage/Archaeology |
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| Founded | 2011 |
| Headquarters |
Registered Office: 4th Floor, 27-33 Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch, London E1 6LA |
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Key people
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Managing Director: Lisa Westcott Wilkins Project Director: Brendon Wilkins Fieldschool Manager: Raksha Dave Community Manager: Maiya Pina-Dacier |
| Products | Digstarter; Digital Dig Team; Dirty Weekends |
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Number of employees
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5 |
| Website | www.digventures.com |
DigVentures is a social enterprise organising crowdfunded archaeological excavation experiences. It is registered with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (CIfA), and is a CIfA Accredited Field School.
Headquartered in London, DigVentures works globally with a network of regional partners to raise seed capital for, and increasing participation in, sustainable archaeology and heritage projects worldwide. The organisation was formed in 2011, responding to the challenge of austerity and lack of opportunity in the heritage sector. By adopting a crowdfunding and crowdsourcing approach, DigVentures have sought to address this by using digital and social media to build audiences, increase revenue and find new ways for the public to participate in archaeological fieldwork.
DigVentures projects are coordinated through an online multicurrency crowdfunding platform (DigStarter) designed to connect heritage sector managers and archaeologists (project owners) with a worldwide crowd of interested and actively engaged participants. Project owners choose a timeframe and target-funding goal, selling non-monetary rewards and experiences linked to their projects through their social networks. This has enabled the public to financially support interesting archaeology projects as well as to join in, learn new skills and contribute to internationally important research. Heritage projects using this model on the DigStarter platform include Flag Fen Lives, Leiston Abbey, Save the Welsh Streets, Researching Roman Southwell and Chiltern Open Air Museum.
In 2014 DigVentures received a grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund to develop its Digital Dig Team. This has been described as a ‘Community Management System’ for archaeology projects. It is built onto a cloud-based, open-source software platform enabling researchers to publish data directly from the field using any web-enabled device (such as a smartphone or tablet) into a live relational database. Once recorded the born-digital archive is accessible via open-access on a dedicated website, and published to social profiles of all project participants. Beta tested in the field at Leiston Abbey in 2014, early results have shown that the Digital Dig Team system can enable archaeologists to build audiences (through immersive storytelling), generate revenue (through crowdfunding), enable public participation (through crowdsourcing) and improve research by making results available to a networked specialist team in 'real time'. A children's version of this system has also been developed, based on a ‘Cyber Dig’ simulated excavation for use in schools or family events.
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