What is the Museum Professionals Network?
Our Transforming Future Museums programme has kick-started the creation of the Museum Professionals Network: a peer-focused network that will operate as a space to improve knowledge sharing, explore unexpected fields and modes of collaboration, and foster peer-to-peer consultation. We aim to create a platform that will facilitate transversal and cross-sectoral collaborations, exchange of expertise across the museum and cultural sector in Greece, and challenge the status quo in professionals’ perceptions as well as in their working environments.
Emerging from our first International Museum Academy, the network aspires to empower and engage museum professionals in a journey of personal and collective professional development for the future well-being of museums and their people. The Museum Professionals Network will form part of a supportive and collaborative peer network to explore the role of museums and culture in Greece, and ways of bringing different culture professionals together.
We aim to create a museum community that will share knowledge, exchange good practice, develop skills and encourage openness.
The principles of the network are:
- peer-to-peer contact and learning
- sharing knowledge, exchanging good practice and encouraging openness
- writing and sharing: reflecting on projects and their impact
- fostering working cultures and collaborations with museums and networks within and beyond Greece.
The programme is supported by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation.
What are the network’s aims?
The Museum Professionals Network aims to:
- foster working cultures which encourage openness, collaboration, innovation and allow for risk and failure
- create an empowered national network of museum and heritage professionals who will share knowledge, exchange good practice and work as champions and advocates for the sector
- give participants access to a growing global network of museum professionals and connect them with other institutions and individual professionals in an international forum
- broaden vision and strengthen professional confidence of the museum workforce to empower them to become agents of change within their organisations and shape the future
- provide members with opportunities for professional development
- articulate clear arguments and raise awareness of the value of heritage and museums in cultural, social, economic and environmental development, and provide advocacy for the sector to influence national, regional and local policies and stakeholders
- connect with similar networks in Europe and internationally
- connect with creative and other industries (e.g. suppliers).
Who can be part of the Museum Professionals Network?
The Museum Professionals Network welcomes professionals from the following backgrounds:
- museum and heritage professionals from a broad variety of backgrounds
- freelance museum and cultural managers, as well as freelance curators
- museum and heritage organisations; small, mid or large-scale
- policy and decision makers at a national, regional and local level
- other professionals who could contribute to museum workings, already or potentially.
Pop-up meetings
The museum as an innovator – a platform, space and catalyst for social and cultural development
Creative consultant Dr Tom Fleming meets the Museum Professionals Network and the CoMuseum audience for a webinar on the role of museums.
At their best, museums are change makers. They don’t just reflect on and present knowledge and culture, they play a transformative role in the ways we see and understand the world. By opening up, embracing technology and co-creating experiences with their audiences, museums can become much more impactful for placemaking, community cohesion and a range of social and environmental outcomes. This is particularly important in a Covid (or post-Covid) world, where museums can help renew the social contract, supporting people to build a fresh future based on a very different new reality. For some museums, change-making comes more easily. Openness, interaction and exploration are in their institutional DNA. But many museums are at a crossroads – between their analogue past and cross-platform future, between their local communities and global realities, and between their unique specialisms and a set of transversal agendas linked to community, place, environment, education, health and wellbeing. There are many opportunities to pursue but also significant and deep-set challenges to overcome.
This webinar will introduce a range of themes and examples to stimulate dialogue on how we can re-imagine the role of museums via the concept of the museum as a sandbox: an open innovation platform where the challenges and opportunities of our time converge and which takes on a social, placemaking role in bringing us together as we recover from this latest crisis.
About Dr Tom Fleming
Dr Tom Fleming is a leading international expert on the creative economy, cultural and arts policy, and creative cities and regions. His work focuses on advising governments, municipalities and institutions across the world to develop effective research, policy, strategy and action across the creative economy. He has led strategic research projects in every region, with a particularly strong track record in Europe, Russia, SE Asia, the Caribbean, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East.
| When | Tuesday 30 June 2020 |
| Where | Instructions and link to join the event will be sent to participants via email. |
| Information | Katerina.Galani@britishcouncil.gr | 210 369 2386 |
Pop-up meetings: Network members only
| 5 March 2020 17.30 |
Museum Professionals Network guided tour by the NEON team |
| 5 March 2020 18.30 |
Museum Professionals Network social |
Meetings 2017–18
In 2017–18 we ran ten meetings with the Museum Professionals Network covering the following topics:
- Network and my role
- From a network to a community
- International Museum Academy Athens
- International Museum Academy Thessaloniki
- Updates from the Network’s working groups
- Accessibility in museums
- Evaluation and museums
- Organising events in museum spaces
- Museums and digital skills
- Audience research and museums
Information
For further information, please contact Katerina Galani:
| Katerina.Galani@britishcouncil.gr | |
| Telephone | 210 369 2386 |