#2 Policy Recommendation Area
Empower democratic and community-focused cultural heritage institutions
2.1 Review and enhance cultural heritage institutions’ operational principles and practices to support participation, co-creation and community focus
Target Stakeholders
Heritage Networks
Cultural Heritage Institutions
Recommendation
We encourage cultural heritage institutions to become more profoundly empowered to engage with communities, both online and offline. Cultural heritage institutions will only become genuinely participative and community-focused when giving their communities the space (digital and analogue) they need. This can be space to gather, or space allowing for community involvement (e.g via consulting) in the decisional phases of the realisation of participative processes, and for use of the communities’ knowledge to enrich the collections (eg. via crowdsourcing efforts or by collecting user generated content). For this, cultural heritage institutions need to have the freedom and capacity to create new inclusive and participatory operational models and procedures.
The new principles and practices might require the introduction of new professional roles in organisations, or the strengthening of existing roles of a similar profile that will contribute, structurally, to the transition process and managing new digital heritage communities, supporting sustainability, and empowering diversity. These new positions should be perceived as an essential part of the cultural heritage institution’s core operational team.
