The British Council Greece and Google, in partnership with the Future Library and BIOS and in collaboration with Snook, are hosting a Culture Shift event in Athens.

Following on from the successful Culture Shift event held last year, we are aiming to develop a range of ideas and digital prototypes that solve or build on challenges regarding the cultural sector in Greece.

What is Culture Shift?
Since 2011, Culture Shift events have been held all over the world – including Nigeria, Dubai, South America and Egypt – helping motivate cultural economies across the globe. The model has a proven track record of stimulating innovation in the cultural sector worldwide.

A Culture Shift event is similar to a hack weekend; where business ideas are generated and tested over a short period of time by designers, developers, innovators, individuals and groups from the local cultural sector.

The event will predominantly be in English.

Does it cost anything?
The three-day event is free!

A weekend ticket covers your attendance for the entire event, from Friday evening to Sunday evening. The event will be held at Romantso.

When is it?
We are currently finalising the programme and will send updates soon, but the plan is to run the Culture Shift: Technology meets Art from Friday 1st April at 17:30 and finish with presentations at 15.00 on Sunday 3rd April. Saturday and Sunday will start at 10am.

We have found that participants usually stay late on Friday and Saturday evenings to work on developing their concepts, but it is not mandatory to do so.

It is vital that you can attend all three days so please ensure that you are able to commit fully to the Culture Shift event.

Who will be there?
It is aimed at collaborative people who have skills in digital development, designers, entrepreneurs/innovators and individuals from the arts and cultural sector to work together over the weekend. If you are interested in attending, please sign-up by midnight on Friday 18th March 2016.

To get the most out of the weekend it's important that we have a variety of participants with different skills and expertise attending. When selecting your ticket, please identify yourself as one of the following:

• Designer (product, service, graphic, web, UX, UI, systems, etc.)
• Developer (web development, software development, coding, app building, hardware hacking, data, etc.)
• Entrepreneur/Innovator (business development, strategy, marketing, etc.)
• Cultural sector (artists, producers, cultural venue managers, festival directors, heritage organisations, libraries, museums, etc.)

Tickets
There are limited spaces for the Culture Shift event and should the event be over-subscribed, we will have a waiting list. If you find your ticket type is sold out and you sign-up for another category, please be aware that it is likely we will have to re-allocate your ticket. It is important that we have a balanced mix of skills over the weekend, so please choose only the ticket type that is relevant for your knowledge/skill set.

PLEASE CHOOSE ONLY ONE TICKET TYPE WHEN ORDERING.

Once you have reserved your ticket, you will be asked to complete a short form to allow us to review ticket holders and ensure that your skill set and ticket type are a match. It will take no longer than 5 minutes to complete. If the form is not completed we will need to re-allocate your ticket.

Tickets are allocated on a first-come-first-served basis. Once the event is sold out any tickets that become available will be allocated to those on the waiting list who are listed as the relevant ticket type.

What challenges will we be addressing?
You can submit challenges for the teams to potentially address during the event – what do challenges do you think the Greek cultural sector faces? We would love to know.

We are looking for the challenge themes to be submitted by both the public and people working within the arts sector, and to have an emphasis on how technology and social media platforms can be incorporated to support arts, culture and heritage in Greece. The deadline for challenge theme submissions is midnight on the 11th March 2016.

How will the event work?
As the event has a large number of people attending, we will provisionally place everyone into teams to ensure we have a balance of skills across each team. To do this we will ask all ticket-holders to select the Top 3 challenges that they would like to work on. These themes will be based on the submitted challenge themes.

It will be possible to change teams on Saturday morning – we want the event to be fun and for people to work on addressing the challenge themes that they find interesting!!

I can't make the entire event, can I still get involved?
If you can't make the event, we would still love for you to be involved!

You can follow the entire event on social media using the hashtag #CultureShiftAthens

To kick-off the weekend, we are hosting a public Speaker event on Friday 1st April. Speakers are still TBC but we will have updates soon. The final presentations from our Culture Shift Athens teams will also be held on Sunday 3rd April at 15.00. Tickets for both of these public events are available here.

Don't forget, you can also submit a challenge theme.

** Please note, if you are attending the Culture Shift Athens weekend, your weekend ticket INCLUDES your admission to the speaker event and to the presentation event too.**