Participants came, amongst others, from education departments and communications teams, from small memorial sites and large institutions. What they shared was the experience that digital expertise in remembrance work has to be built with great effort and often without structural support.
A recent survey by the Landecker Digital Memory Lab among 127 remembrance institutions worldwide underlines this experience in numbers: 42.5 percent of the institutions surveyed have less than one full-time position available for digital tasks. Lack of funding, the absence of long-term digital strategies, and rapid technological change were among the structural challenges mentioned most frequently.
What many experience as an isolated problem becomes a shared reality at the rememBarcamp.
The Agenda Took Shape on Site
Unlike traditional professional conferences, the rememBarcamp once again began without a predefined programme. Participants developed the agenda themselves at the beginning of the first day. The topics discussed came directly from practice and were shaped by those who deal with these challenges every day. In five parallel 45-minute session blocks, short inputs, discussions, and workshops took place - 23 sessions over two days in total. The format created a space in which not only successes were shared, but also mistakes and lessons learned.
The range of topics reflected the diversity of digital challenges in memorial site work. Discussions focused on platform strategies and dealing with hate and disinformation on social media, digital infrastructure and archiving, the use of AI in educational work, and formats designed to reach new and especially younger audiences. The use of AI was a particular focus. As a tool, it can help make archives accessible, open up sources, and enable translations. At the same time, it accelerates the production and dissemination of fake history: synthetic images and texts that imitate historical authenticity without possessing it. The discussions showed that, on this issue, memorial sites need shared positions and standards that individual institutions cannot develop on their own.
© Mittelbach-Fotografie
© SHGL
© Mittelbach-Fotografie
© Mittelbach-Fotografie
© Mittelbach-Fotografie
© Mittelbach-Fotografie
© Mittelbach-Fotografie
Working Together Where Individual Institutions Reach Their Limits
Capacity building and networking are more effective than individual attempts at solutions. Over the past five years, the rememBarcamp has shown that a protected space for open exchange on equal footing can achieve more than formal professional conferences, because it builds trust, allows questions, and enables cooperation that would otherwise not emerge. From this trust, concrete projects and collaborations have grown over the past years and continued to have an impact beyond the individual events.
A Network Takes Shape
The anniversary edition aimed to formalize the network that had emerged in 2022 at the first rememBarcamp. The network “Digital History and Memory” was founded as a cross-institutional structure dedicated to supporting digital projects at memorial sites in the long term. It is intended to develop shared standards, organise knowledge transfer, and enable cooperation - whether through open-source projects, content-related collaboration, or jointly developed technical solutions.
The Alfred Landecker Foundation co-funded all five editions of the rememBarcamp: in 2022 at the Ravensbrück Memorial, in 2023 at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, in 2024 at the Hadamar Memorial, in 2025 at the Documentation Centre Nazi Forced Labour Berlin-Schöneweide, and in 2026 at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial.