The Fund wish to create a museum environment in Belgium for pionneering IT.
To do this the fund hopes to create a Centre for Pioneering IT in Belgium. Such a centre would:
1. Safeguard the remaining industrial, scientific and cultural heritage in this field. Documents and machines that would be preserved are also a testimony to the more or less automated management tools used in the administrative, industrial and service sectors’ past in Belgium.
2. Permanently safeguard for the future those collections that lack a certain institutional status.
3. Make future generations of young people aware of the heritage of the technologies they use and of the fact that they are the foundation of the new cultural age developing.
4. Make the general public aware of hitherto widely dispersed and little known collections that bear witness to the amazing developments that shape the lives of the individual and society of today and will do so even more in the future.
5. Establish the pioneering role played by Belgium in numerous fields of emerging information technology, a role that is little known today.
6. Take advantage of Belgium’s rather central geographical location in Europe: the IT museums closest to Belgium are in Germany (Nixdorf-Siemens, in Padderborn, 375 kms, and Munich, 739 kms away), in England (the Science Museum in London and The National Computing Museum in Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, 400 kms), and in France (ACONIT in Grenoble, 840 kms), which poses some problems for raising awareness through visits for schools and other relevant groups.
7. Promote and save similar collections to that of the Collective in fields such as word processing and the processing of data that have revolutionized the way we act, in fields such as communication, medicine, space, industry, commerce, art and teaching.
