We welcome you to two public, free-admission events, in the opening (October 10) and the closing (October 11) parts of the conference. More details about the content and other speakers will be announced soon.
Keynote speakers
Director, KEA European Affairs
Arthur Le Gall is director at KEA and co-founder of the b.creative network, a global community of more than 1500 creative entrepreneurs. Arthur has 10+ years of experience in evaluating and designing support programmes and policies for the cultural and creative sectors to nurture arts, culture and creativity across Europe and beyond. Arthur also delivers strategic advice to local authorities on the role of sport, culture and creative industries for local and regional development, and he is currently part of the team performing the mid-term evaluation of the European Capitals of Culture Action for 2020-2033. This study will play a key role in collecting and analysing evidence to evaluate the implementation of the European Capitals of Culture (ECoC) action and its longer-term impact in order to draw lessons for the future of the initiative. The study will also contribute to the evaluation of the ECoC selection and monitoring processes in view of the preparation of the new legal basis for the period post-2033.
Lecturer and researcher, West University of Timișoara
Dr. Silvia Fierăscu is a Lecturer at the Department of Communication Sciences, the Founder and Director of FabLab – Social Fabrics Research Lab, and Researcher at the Big Data Science Laboratory, all at West University of Timișoara. She holds a PhD in Political Science with a specialisation in Network Science from Central European University in Budapest, and she is Head of OrgMapper Academy at Maven7 Network Research Inc. Her research experience is on applications of network and data science to social science problems. Dr. Fierăscu works in various international, intersectoral and interdisciplinary projects, translating complex problems into solutions for organisational development, change management, better communication, good governance, public policy, and social impact. She works with the Center for Projects of the Municipality of Timișoara to map the network effects of the Timișoara ECoC Programme on the local organisation ecosystem, and to make recommendations for future public policies to support a positive legacy of the Programme.
Head of Research and Innovation, Consorzio Materahub
Graduated in Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, Carlo Ferretti is a public value designer, dedicated to local development policies and strategies. He leads the department of Research and Innovation of Materahub, curating several European projects, from Horizon Europe, to COSME and Creative Europe. Specifically, within this project dimension, he designed data-oriented methodologies, as in the case of IMPACTOUR, developing a platform for supporting public administrations’ local development strategy, or DROP, where he designed and implemented co-governance approaches to deprived areas. Carlo is a social impact evaluator, leveraging SROI and the VBA (Value Based Approach) methodologies to organisations such as Matera European Capital of Culture 2019 or the Nuto Revelli Foundation. Furthermore, he worked for the Municipality of Bari, fulfilling project management tasks during an URBACT project (Com.unity.Lab). He teaches for the Cultural Management Master of Feltrinelli Foundation and for the Master of Advanced Education on Private Cultural Heritage of Intesa San Paolo. From 2021, Carlo is an affiliate researcher of the Metalab Harvard.