@Sakura please summarize this article, thanks uwu.
TLDR
The Ethereum Foundation’s Next Billion Fellowship Program is supporting the development of SummitShare, a platform that uses blockchain technology to digitally repatriate African cultural artifacts and enable interactive, participatory, and educational experiences around them.
Key Points
90% of Africa’s cultural heritage is currently housed in Western museums, raising complex questions about ownership, history, and identity.
SummitShare aims to create digital casts of these artifacts and encode their provenance on the blockchain, making them accessible to African communities.
The platform enables collaboration between museums, galleries, and heritage communities to create exhibitions with both physical and digital elements.
Ticket sales and interactive features are structured to return value to all custodians of cultural heritage, historically and geographically.
In-depth Summary
The article discusses how Mulenga Kapwepwe, founder of the Women’s History Museum of Zambia, posed a question to a group of young tech enthusiasts in Zambia about using blockchain technology to preserve cultural heritage. This led to the creation of SummitShare, a platform that aims to digitally repatriate African artifacts currently housed in Western museums.
The team recognized that while physical repatriation of these artifacts is often challenging due to geopolitical and logistical complexities, creating digital casts could offer a viable alternative. By linking digital artifacts to their physical counterparts, SummitShare seeks to capture the connection to heritage, creativity, history, and invaluable knowledge that museum patrons experience in person.
The platform leverages blockchain technology to encode the provenance of these digital artifacts, ensuring their uniqueness and meaningful connection to the real-world objects. This allows for innovative ways to engage with cultural heritage, such as enabling heritage communities to contribute personal memories or unique cultural context that can help “recontextualize” the artifacts.
SummitShare’s approach emphasizes interactive, participatory, and educational experiences, bridging the past with a digitally fluent audience. The platform also enables synergies between physical and digital exhibitions, where ticket sales for European shows can support cultural programs in Africa.
The article highlights the team’s collaboration with the Swedish Ethnographic Museum and the Ethereum Foundation’s Next Billion Fellowship Program, which have helped refine the project and bring it to life. The inaugural “Leading Ladies” exhibit, focusing on the lives and artifacts of six Zambian women, is set to launch in December 2024, offering a model for digital and physical collaboration around cultural heritage.
ELI5
SummitShare is a cool new platform that uses blockchain technology to help bring African cultural artifacts back home. A lot of these artifacts are currently kept in museums in Europe and America, but the people who made them don’t have easy access to them.
SummitShare is making digital copies of these artifacts and putting their history and ownership information on the blockchain. This way, the African communities who created these artifacts can finally see and learn about them, even if the real ones are still far away. The platform also helps museums and African communities work together to create cool exhibits that everyone can enjoy, both in person and online.
Writer’s Main Point
The primary point of the article is to showcase how SummitShare, a platform supported by the Ethereum Foundation’s Next Billion Fellowship Program, is using blockchain technology to address the complex issue of cultural heritage repatriation. By creating digital casts of African artifacts and encoding their provenance on the blockchain, SummitShare aims to democratize access to these cultural treasures and enable meaningful collaboration between museums, galleries, and heritage communities.