The O-City project emerged from the idea to create ‘virtual world that preserves cultural and natural heritage of cities presented in a new, multimedia way’. This global project is financed by the European Union through Erasmus+ programme for 2019-2021 and it includes participation of 13 organisations, companies, universities and cultural institutions from Spain, Greece, Serbia, Slovenia, Columbia and Italy, including the ‘Novi Sad 2021’ Foundation.

First meeting with partners in the project was held in Spain on 4 and 5 February.

The idea of the project is to:

• Discover, promote and increase cultural (tangible and intangible) heritage of cities in terms of identity development and image of cities in the eyes of their own inhabitants and social stability;

• Encourage creative economy by training experts in the field of creative technologies in order to integrate their knowledge into existing or new companies; sectors for art and culture, which were strengthened in the past, new view towards the future of new technologies, thus emphasising them in the field of creative economy;

• Modernise universities and introduce innovations in methods of teaching and learning such as learning based on projects, through initiative for lectures on engineering and encouraging team work, initiation, creation, implementation and work by using agile SCRUM methodology.

These goals will be achieved through cooperation between triple creative partnership: universities, companies and cities; through creation and implementation of flexible, interactive, multilingual and intercultural platform as the laboratory for cultural innovation, multimedia items, training procedures, skills and tools for innovative learning, which are developed by students, professors and professionals in order to promote culture and social values.

The role of the ‘Novi Sad 2021’ Foundation in the project is to discover, promote and influence the increase of knowledge about cultural heritage through identification and categorisation of different cultural realities and their presentation on the online platform. The platform will have the fundamental role in discovering culture at the local level. Throughout the project, the ‘Novi Sad 2021’ Foundation presents the city abroad from the cultural perspective, in order to promote its economy through culture.  In brief, NSF (National Science Foundation) promotes creative economy in Novi Sad. Therefore it will actively work on designing plans of training. The ‘Novi Sad 2021’ Foundation will gather examples of good practice from cities that gained the title of the European Capital of Culture in the previous years. Those examples will be analysed and used as the input for improvement of economic conditions of creative industries.  These activities will contribute to the success of the project in accordance with the strategy of cultural, economic and social development of the city in the following years.