There is a large chunk of software history prior to pre-cloud services that has died in someone's hard drive, floppy, CD.
Maybe because it was tied to IP or maybe just because they didn't think much about its historic value or didn't see it as ground breaking or note worthy.
The thing about History in general is that we as present time people have a poor intuition of what is valuable historic data for people in a future (long time from now) time.
Today we draw conclusions from graffiti on Roman walls or Babylonian complaint records. Arguably at the time nobody would consider vandalism or customer service records worth preserving for posterity.
Sure but I don't see how being on a UN list helps fix that. Seems to me like efforts from people behind eg scene.org, archive.org (hat tip to jscott) etc are substantially more valuable to preservation efforts than convincing some folk dance geeks who work at the UN that rotating nipple balls are also cool (which of course they are)
EDIT: To be clear, I don't mean to dismiss the effort. The entire point of the demoscene is "because we can!", so obviously this also holds for getting our hobby listed by the UN.
It is a great way of spreading the word ... many small organizations don't have the man power to do "other things" (like looking up how to apply for strange grants, let alone maybe know about them).
> The biggest benefit is in bringing legitimacy to preservation efforts and curation of historic records (photos, videos, data, binaries, sources) on the history of the Demoscene.
It's not necessarily about "effort" but perhaps more about "appearances" - it's easier to say "This history is important enough to be recognized by UNESCO: give us money to preserve it!"
Hello, person who controls government funding for the arts! The demoscene is now a UNESCO cultural heritage property in three different countries, including ours. We are a group dedicated to (preserving/documenting/continuing) this wonderful and unique expression of the artistic urge. You should give us a lot of money to keep doing this.
...in much more polite language, and with descriptions of exactly what you'll be doing with that money, of course.
You could apply for a grant big enough for your group to take a year off your day jobs and spend it hacking the hell out of your submission for a major party. You could get a chunk of money to keep your site full of demos running. You could get the state helping to pay the expenses for the party you run.
All of these things obviously have existing ways to pay their expenses or the scene would have died off long ago, but why not add another one?