An important element of success of Hidden Collections Africa involves engaging youth around the world—the number could be eventually in the millions—to participate in the digitization and integration of cultural resources that would otherwise be lost or damaged by climate change into teaching and learning and, generally, into the life of their communities across the world.

Often anchored by a regional institution—library, archive, community service, NGO, tribal council, place of worship, school, their digitization would be accomplished most often by smart phones under the aegis of a coherent, universal training process. The captured images would be processed through our technical platform, completely open source, which includes advanced applications (semantic search, theme detection), tools (visualization techniques), ethical AI, storage, ease of code evolution, and new resource aggregation (stories and research conducted on the platform will become part of the platform’s resources offerings). All resources/content would be sustainable, cataloged, and easily reusable.

If well coordinated, a very large cohort of young people would begin to make a difference in how we perceive and can respond to climate change. Those benefits include:

• Thoughtfully and programmatically engaging a significant population of the world in mitigating the damage of climate change
• Providing an exemplar of successful contribution at scale to inspire further collective projects
• Providing a successful adaptation strategy for survival of human identity
• Providing experience to perceive the world and our place in it differently
• Facilitating a more sophisticated understanding of temporal continuity—past, present, and future
• Facilitating a greater appreciation of human agency when confronting this crisis which in turn can promote
• Generating hope

Further, collateral effects of the project on the population at large could entail a salient, collaborative, and determinative ‘change of mind,’ beneficially altering perceptions, definitions, approaches, and responses relating to climate change.

Possible outcomes:

• The general understanding of the urgency of climate change will be enhanced
• The costs and disruptive dimensions of climate change will be better appreciated
• The relation of climate change as a core challenge to humanity—recontextualizing what is currently a rather statistical set of propositions—could be better grasped
• Denying climate change as a phenomenon will be more difficult
• Counter arguments dismissing climate change will be less tenable and creditable
• The powerful effects of an SIS would become better appreciated
• More collective action in response to climate change could be catalyzed

This effort aligns with CLIR’s priority to build projects that exemplify longer timeframes of funding and that fluoresce a redefinition of key terms and conceptual framing of a project’s goals. As examples of this thinking, an expanded concept of infrastructure would comprise an applied interdependence of support across institutions, cultures, and generations, gaining an organic complexity and motion to infrastructure that is often missing. A less bounded, more thoughtful approach would attract new collaborators and contributors who know the project is not short lived. The technological platform could similarly evolve; a longer time frame also can attract more of a community of technologists who can work together to mutual benefit that would be more difficult in a shorter build out: team sourcing and alliance maturation. Architecting platforms that welcome new practitioners, new resources, and fresh perspectives would be integral to the design, interweaving sustainability and infrastructure as symbiotic and undetachable functions that are at heart socially constructed.