Public engagement - why bother?

This paper covers a lot of ground including the benefits (and constraints) of public engagement, e.g.:

"I have personally found that a lot of times, that good questions that you get from people outside your own field can really make you examine some of your assumptions…it’s regions that you wouldn’t have explored intellectually because of your sort of academic history."

Thanks Emily Dawson for highlighting this

"Stirling University's Professor David Goulson was the winner of Social Innovator of the Year award. His innovation was increasing the impact of his academic work by founding of the Bumblebee Conservation Trust.

Goulson says that the Bumblebee Conservation Trust came out of frustration that scientific research, even when published in the best journals, is very often only read by other scientists, not by people who might put this knowledge into practice. "You can publish experiments in high quality journals again and again but they are only read by a few dozen scientists who work in your field. It achieves little or nothing in the real world"

"I do think there's a general problem in the UK, and perhaps elsewhere, that there is no obvious mechanism for scientists to translate applied research to get it to policy makers and the general public and so on," he says, citing three extinctions from Britain's 25 bumblebee species as a reason for immediate action. "For bumblebees, we now understand enough about them to have a pretty good idea how to conserve them, but we need to get that knowledge put into practise."

That is where the Bumblebee Conservation Trust comes in. The formal aims of the trust are to conserve bumblebee populations, prevent species extinctions, and promote conservation of bees and wider biodiversity to the public. "Bumblebees pollinate crops which we need to eat. It's really easy to explain the importance of bumblebees to people with no interest in biodiversity or polar bears or pandas," says Goulson. "Without bees food would be more expensive, and there would be less of it and less variety. For economic reasons alone it's worth doing without all the other reasons.""

Thanks to Wendy Barnaby for highlighting this

This page has some short audio from Professor Nancy Rothwell and Dr Erinma Ochu reflecting on the Manchester Beacon for Public Engagement and touching on some of the benefits of public engagement - skills, new knowledge, the potnetial to be promoted for doing public engagement.

Thanks to @erinmaochu for this

The first phase of this project involved research with scientists at various stages in their careers (and other science communicators) and identified the patterns of motivation and perceived benefits of involvement in public engagement activities.

The results of this research are published in an Oxford University Press book:

Holliman, R. and Jensen, E. (2009). (In)authentic science and (im)partial publics: (re)constructing the science outreach and public engagement agenda, in Holliman, R., Whitelegg, E., Scanlon, E., Smidt, S. and Thomas, J. (eds.) Investigating science communication in the information age: Implications for public engagement and popular media. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

The results are also summarised in the freely available published final report on the project: http://isotope.open.ac.uk/?q=node/565 

Thanks to Eric Jensen for highlighting this

John Ward: "Having to describe both my research and that of others in words that the general public can understand is a challenge. It’s easy to slip into jargon that even other scientists don’t understand, so thinking carefully to describe Synthetic Biology in clear and straightforward terms was difficult at first. The participants latched on to the ideas in Synthetic Biology very quickly and it was good to hear what they thought was the most important challenges that we should be focussing on."

"Impacts on scientists, experts and other stakeholders involved in the dialogue projects included having enabled them to develop new skills, experience and confidence in communicating with the public, provided opportunities to learn about public views, fears and questions first hand, increased their respect for the quality of the potential public contribution to science and technology, and enabled them to gain a higher personal profile and build new relationships and networks."

Expert participants were generally positive about their involvement in the process. They were impressed with the level of energy and engagement in the groups and the scientists were pleasantly surprised with the strength of support for their research among many participants. For some, participation in the workshops developed or reinforced a sense of the value of public engagement and dialogue. Interestingly the social scientists found it particularly valuable from a professional perspective to be participants in a process they would usually critique.