Launch of digital.culture.hub Lower Saxony: coapp brings together thousands of creatives from all over Lower Saxony

On 29.06.2022 the digital.culture.hub Lower Saxony, the new platform for Lower Saxony's cultural and creative industries, was officially launched. The joint project of Music Land Lower Saxony and Hafven strengthens Lower Saxony as a location for this fast-growing and future-relevant industry. In a model project unique in Germany, cross-industry, state-wide networking of all creative people in Lower Saxony is made possible and the potential of these economic sectors is increased through new opportunities for innovation and cooperation. 

Image: The digital.culture.hub Niedersachsen matches digitally and thus promotes collaboration and innovation in "real life".

With the help of the community platform coapp, existing and locally active projects such as the Co-Working Space for Musicians Ramp from Hanover, the Club network Association for the Concert Industry in Lower Saxony, and PULS, the new cultural and creative industries hub in Hildesheim, will be supported in digitally networking their members and facilitating the sharing of infrastructure such as rooms and equipment. Over the course of the project, new features will also be developed, such as the formation of alliances between the Spaces and the AI-supported matching of people, projects and infrastructure. 

As a hybrid hub, the digital.culture.hub Niedersachsen is intended to contribute to making the potential of entrepreneurial creatives visible and to increasing it through networking. In addition to the digital platform coapp, numerous partners will also make their premises available to the community. In this way, existing structures will be accompanied and strengthened by digital transformation processes, thus making an important contribution to the future viability of culture in Lower Saxony.

Not least the Corona pandemic has shown how important exchange opportunities are for creatives. With the digital.culture.hub Niedersachsen, Lower Saxony's cultural and creative industries now have a low-threshold opportunity to get in touch with each other, find new partners and enter into new collaborations from a wide range of industries, such as music, games or design. Thus, for the first time in Lower Saxony, there is a platform that is specifically tailored to the needs of creative professionals. At the same time, it offers the possibility to measure the degree of networking of these economic sectors and to reflect it in figures.

Stefan Muhle, State Secretary in Lower Saxony's Ministry of Economics, Labor, Transport and Digitalization, says: "Networking among each other is a major challenge for creatives in the state of Lower Saxony, and especially in rural areas. With the digital.culture.hub Niedersachsen, we are now offering creatives new opportunities for interaction, with a project that is unparalleled anywhere in Germany. It shows the importance that the state of Lower Saxony attaches to the cultural and creative industries."

Sina-Mareike Schulte, deputy director of Musikland Niedersachsen, adds:

"In the Corona pandemic, many forms of digital networking and collaboration were tested that open up new avenues for creatives. We are pleased that, starting with the music industry, we are taking digital and interdisciplinary networking to a new level with the digital.culture.hub Niedersachsen, from which not only local scenes can benefit, but with which the potential of the cultural and creative industries can also be further expanded throughout Lower Saxony."

For Jonas Lindemann, managing director of coapp and Hafven, the project focuses in particular on the possibilities for making interactions visible: "With the digital.culture.hub Niedersachsen, it will be possible for the first time to show the potential of a 'network' using valid data on interactions and collaborations. Whereas it was previously impossible to measure the exchange between creatives, this is now possible. And there are also some great enhancements in store for communities in the future, for example with matchmaking based on this data."

The project is part of the DigitalHubs.Lower Saxony, funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Economics, Labor, Transport and Digitalization, under the leadership of the Landesmusikakademie und Music Land Lower Saxony gGmbH in cooperation with Hafven
GmbH & Co. KG.