MiBAC, communication officer competition hopefuls call for exhaustion of rankings

Successful candidates in the 2016 Ministry of Cultural Heritage competition for the profile of promotion and communication officer send an open letter to Minister Alberto Bonisoli to demand the exhaustion of the grduature. We publish the text below.

Dear Minister,
we are the successful candidates in the competition ranking for the Promotion and Communication Officer profile. We would first like to extend to you our sincerest wishes for a fruitful work.
We would hereby like to invite you to draw your attention to the figure of the Promotion and Communication Officer who, in our opinion, could effectively contribute to supporting and implementing the Ministry’s cultural policies.
As is well known, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism launched a competitive procedure in May 2016 aimed at identifying new cultural professionals in order to curb the increasingly burdensome staff shortages suffered by the institution. This resulted in the selection of 500 officials (archaeologists, communicators, architects, art historians, anthropologists, demoethnoanthropologists, restorers, librarians, and archivists), producing a total ranking of more than 1,000 successful and eligible candidates, of whom fewer than 600 have so far taken up their posts.
As of today, up to 1,000 hires are authorized, and approximately one hundred successful candidates would be left out. Having already determined rankings available, we ask you to consider the exhaustion of these rankings as a concrete and immediate response to the needs and objectives of your department.
One of the profiles with the highest number of suitable candidates, proportionally, is precisely that of Promotion and Communication Officer.
From the mobility tables (Table B of the DD of August 8, 2017) there appear to be only 77 units for the communicators profile, of which 35 (compared to the 40 provided for by the DDG of December 22, 2017, in which are included, in addition to the 30 of the notice of competition, an additional 10 units authorized by the dpcm of April 4, 2017) have been “covered” with the hirings that have taken place so far. This number seems to us inadequate and insufficient, given the role that this figure would play within the various institutions of your Ministry.
As you recently pointed out, in order to breathe new life into the cultural heritage, it is necessary to recruit by investing in qualified, motivated and competent people, and therefore to continue resolutely on the path taken. Only in this way will it be possible to achieve those goals - which you have so resolutely shown from the outset that you want to pursue - of effective protection, enhancement and enjoyment of our immense cultural heritage.
Your willingness to listen to the needs of those working in the sector is positively striking, and it is in confident respect of this constructive spirit that we are about to stimulate a reflection on the role of the Promotion and Communication Officer within the Ministry.
This professional figure carries out his action within the sphere of valorization and fruition - indicated by you not as mere instruments of profit - in order to make heritage a wealth known and experienced by the citizenry.
This innovative profile has been placed, in the context of the hires to date, within the Autonomous Museums and Museum Poles, in which it performs a fundamental liaison action with the community. The Museum Poles-which proved to be, perhaps, one of the weak points of the reform-suffer from a lack of governance (minimum levels of museum quality, attribution of management and, above all, programmatic activity), an experimental phase of which should be launched soon. They suffer from a shortage of staff and, involving large territories and numerous cultural institutes, would need a more articulated communication effort. The involvement of a greater number of professionals would be advisable in order to strengthen their role as a connector, as a place of dialogue between the different museum realities and the public and private actors present in the territory in which they operate (as is happening with fair success for some autonomous museums). Only in this way would it be possible to create, not only on paper, a National System of Museums, putting almost 8,000 Italian museums into a system and thus consolidating the cultural heritage - also from the point of view of a better tourist positioning that Italy can achieve in international competition.
Moreover, we call attention to the importance of the new figure of the promotion and communication officer to promote not only museum networks but also libraries and historical archives through projects aimed in particular at accessibility and communication, at ’innovation of languages and technologies, in order to involve an increasingly numerous and differentiated public; the central role of libraries, museums and archival poles understood as protagonists of the cultural life of communities would thus be strengthened in the territory.
We would also like to invite you to consider that there could be ample room for action for the figure of the communicator in the field of preservation as well.
As stated in the document prepared by the Ministry in 2010 of analysis of the need for professional skills, among the duties of the Promotion and Communication Officer is the following: “collaborates in the development of programs for the promotion of cultural heritage and communication outside the activity of the Administration of Protection, using all advanced technological tools.”
In order to do this, it would therefore be necessary to provide for its presence within the Superintendencies as well, in order to make the entire community fully understand the fundamental and indispensable work of cultural heritage protection carried out by them, with a view to sharing and developing knowledge in the community. As Giuliano Volpe points out, the new Superintendencies, as conceived by the reform initiated in 2014, in fact integrate previously fragmented competencies within a unified vision of cultural heritage, considering it today an organic whole spread throughout the Italian territory. They provide for various sectors within them; communication experts would be needed to enhance and make usable, accessible the cultural wealth of the territory in which they operate.
Considering now outdated those positions that place protection and valorization in antithesis, we believe that the latter is, to use Pietro Petraroia’s words, “protection that becomes a relationship, through the widespread appropriation of tools for reading and enjoying cultural heritage”; it is therefore not reserved only for insiders - in an elitist, closed view of heritage - but is based on sharing. Inescapable, then, becomes the action of communication: it is necessary to democratize culture through a narrative of heritage that allows an active citizenry to contribute to the production and awareness of its cultural heritage.
This would be done in harmony both with what is expressed in Article 9 of our Constitution and with the intentions advocated by the Faro Convention signed by Italy in 2013, whose ratification is awaited.
In today’s shift from the right of cultural heritage to the right to cultural heritage, an effective communication strategy - to be implemented through appropriate qualified professionals - such that our immense cultural heritage is recognized as a fundamental part of our community’s identity becomes essential.

In the hope that our observations may be the subject of your reflection with a view to concrete action, we send you our best regards.

Eligibles of the profile Officer of the
Promotion and Communication

Rome, July 5, 2018

MiBAC, communication officer competition hopefuls call for exhaustion of rankings

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