Scoping a National Cultural Data Observatory

Culture Commons is working with the Centre for Cultural Value, The Audience Agency and My Cake to scope a blueprint for a new National Cultural Data Observatory (NCDO) for the UK.

We’re facilitating extensive policy engagement activities with key decision makers in different places and sub-sectors across the UK to understand how the NCDO can meet their future needs.

It is hoped that the NCDO will ultimately bring essential components of the UK’s research infrastructure and knowledge base together and join up public policies and sector strategies related to the UK’s creative, cultural and heritage sectors.

By harmonising well-established national data sets with local and regional data, as well as less structured qualitative data and knowledge, the observatory could also bring the collective intelligence of researchers, policymakers, sector leaders, investors and asset owners together to monitor the vital signs of our sectors.

This work follows the Making Data Work research and recommendations coming out of Culture Commons’ open policy development programme on cultural devolution, The Future of Cultural Devolution in the UK.

This project is funded by the UKRI Economic and Social Research Council and Research England with institutional support and contribution to the direction of the project from colleagues in the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Arts Council England, Historic England, Bradford 2025, Born-in-Bradford, Spirit of 2012, West Yorkshire Combined Authority and the Local Government Association.