Where is cool and creative Wollongong? Have your say right now HERE.

What inspires you in the Central Darling? Tell us HERE.

CAMRA (Cultural Asset Mapping in Regional Australia) is a major Australian Research Council and industry funded project running from 2008 to 2013 as a partnership between seventeen organisations, including four universities.

CAMRA aims to provide planners, policy-makers and communities with the knowledge they need to make better-informed planning decisions for more effective development of their local arts and cultural industries.

It will do this through:

1. developing sustainable models of data collection and documentation that map local cultural industries using a range of methodologies specifically appropriate to regional, rural and remote settings in Australia;
2. building a GIS and relational database to store this information and allow it to be interrogated, analysed and used at local, regional and peak levels by a variety of users;
3. enabling systemised interactions between national and international experts in cultural development through this culturemap.org.au online (and offline) community as a key site for knowledge exchange and storage.

Concentrating on a carefully selected set of communities that cover many different types of regions - so the information can be usefully transposed to a national scale - CAMRA will provide an understanding of how a region's capacity for creativity and innovation can ensure its quality of life and its economic viability. Moreover, it will show researchers and policy-makers how to recognise and valorise regional specificities and local knowledge when piecing together an integrated approach to development.

We encourage you to explore the CAMRA website and sign up to become a member of the culturemap.org.au community.

The blog entries and other content you see on the home page have been posted by members of the culturemap.org.au community - a unique, intranet environment hosted on the CAMRA website and especially developed as a place where people  interested in cultural planning can meet, share and develop information and collaborate in private workrooms or member forums.