Vanessa Spedding tracks them through the jargon

Been to any science-related activities this summer?

Perhaps hung out at a festival, chipped in to a debate, chilled out at a Café Scientifique or explored a discovery centre? Even if not, you can’t have missed the fact that such events and venues are popping up everywhere.

It’s no coincidence that in parallel with this, behind the scenes, a small but growing expert community is gaining shape, strength and identity – a community whose mission is to involve and inspire as many people as possible in science and science-related issues and to encourage understanding and communication about the hottest topics.

The members of this group are the ones inventing and coordinating all the events – and also, sometimes, watching what we do and say at them, and reporting back to those who want to know. An opportunity to attend this year’s Science Communication Conference, in May, offered a great way of learning more about this emerging profession.

May meeting

The conference, organised by the BA and the Royal Society, attracted record numbers of science communication experts from a wide variety of fields including government, academia, education and PR. As conferences go, it was upbeat and friendly, full of smiling, bubbly types exuding personality and enthusiasm. It had as its rationale not just to bring people together to share ideas, but to agree on some aims that the whole community could work towards over the coming year, which provided an unusual sense of focus and purpose.

Like so many expert groups, the science communication bunch cannot get by without its share of in-jokes and jargon. I didn’t get any of the jokes, but the jargon provided amusement enough. The word ‘dialogue’, for example, has become so over-used that an entire presentation was devoted to reminding us what it meant – and by then I needed it – while other sessions were peppered with phrases like ‘upstreaming dialogue’ (meaning talking about it sooner) and ‘participatory assessment’ (still not sure what this means). The best in my book was from Professor Ian Diamond, who at one point said he wanted ‘joined-up best-practice in cross-cutting areas’.

Areas for action

There were some serious issues. The ones the community will concentrate on this year are, for example, the need to ‘share good practice’; the need for funding bodies to reward scientists for communicating about their work; the need to include industry; and the need to bring in social scientists and the media.

Perhaps the most interesting is the one that calls for the conference – and its concerns – to be open to input. This came out of a lively discussion just before the close, in which it was pointed out that a community whose professional role is eliciting and responding to opinion should be especially clever at hearing the voices of its own members, and others, on how it could best operate. This point was agreed. And now comes the action.

The communicators, it appears, want to engage us on engagement – to invite comment on how they can best achieve their aims of getting as many of us involved in scientific issues as possible.

Admittedly, it’s not easy to come up with simple ideas. Communication in different contexts serves different purposes. Different types of communicator want to communicate for different reasons - something that was very apparent at the conference. Some simply want everyone to celebrate science and the wonder it has to offer; some would like to bring public opinion to bear on the formation of policies about new technologies, and some think that policies should be formed by experts behind closed doors and that science communicators should convince the public that they’re fine. Of course most reflect some combination of these standpoints. But putting that complication aside, it’s clear that the entire community is open to input, and is calling for it right now.

What do you think science communicators could do to better include and involve the public? What activity or outcome would inspire you to take part in science, or think about the controversial aspects? What sort of framework should professional communicators build to enable a genuinely worthwhile exchange to happen? What topic should we make sure is hottest at next year’s conference?

All thoughts will be welcomed. Email Nick Hillier at the BA.

Vanesssa Spedding is SPA’s Shorts editor.