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Transcript from a portion of the conference, Communicating the Future: Best Practices for Communication of Science to the Public, March 6-8, 2002. Research
Roadmap for Communicating Science and Technology in the 21st Century [audio files for March 8 begin here at the end of Rick Borchelt's talk] Borchelt: -- it could be another ten years. Certainly, with the kind of economy we're seeing, it's going to go slower. But what I'm interested in is, what's the next platform after the Web? None of us can anticipate that. We don't know what that is, but it could have as profound an impact as the Web has had on this. And lastly, I think what I came away from, and this is not a finding of the group proper, but sort of encapsulates what I put into the Department of Energy and what I put in to every science communications program with which I work, and that is dialogue is the single most under-utilized, poorly understood and under-utilized arsenal, tool kit - tool in your tool kit or weapon in your arsenal for communication. Long-term credibility and success in communication - he didn't say this about science in particular, but it is so true, so true in spades in science, that dialogue and civic involvement in the discussions that we're having is absolutely critical, I think, for the long-term future of science and technology. Communication plays a vital role in setting up that dialogue, in managing that dialogue, in fostering that dialogue, and if there's one thing you should go back and look at your poster, you should look and you should say, "Okay. Does my poster represent a program that fosters dialogue with the community? Does my poster foster dialogue with a strategic public?" That's where I think Jim Grunig's remarks yesterday, while I saw some people, you know, doing the "I don't do public relations" dance yesterday, you really do, because public relations, as Jim was defining it yesterday, that's what this is all about. Dialogue. I'll stop there, take a few questions, and I appreciate your attention this morning. Borchelt: You
need a mic just like I do. Yawning does not count as a question. Question: I can probably talk loud enough. Borchelt: But
it won't get you on the transcript. Question: I
was interested in your characterization of the science attentive audience,
and I was wondering if you could, I was wondering how you obtained the
data to come up with that characterization? Borchelt: Jon has a raft of publications that I'm sure he would be just delighted to share with you, and, Jon, where are you? You're somewhere. Miller: I'm right here. Borchelt: You want to take the mic over to Jon. Borchelt: A Google search on "Jon Miller" and "science and communication" will yield almost all of this. Miller: Yes, the best place for data is to look at the Science and Engineering Indicators, which is a National Science Board publication that comes out every two years. And there's a number of other books and articles that you'll find in most references under my name. In a very capsule summary, it's people who have two characteristics. One is they are very interested in science and technology, and the other is that they think they're well informed about it. It doesn't necessarily mean they have to be well informed, but people who think they're not well informed tend to shy away from participating, and people who believe they're well informed tend to participate. So, it's really the subjective feeling of being well informed, plus having a high level of interest. And about 10% of Americans do that in regard to science issues. Borchelt: Thanks, Jon. Question: I was really thrilled to hear you bring up the whole concept of dialogue and trying to establish and foster dialogue. I've been trying to do a little bit of it myself. The challenge is managing the dialogue. What do you do - I mean, I've specifically been doing it over the Net, and putting in place the system to support that dialogue requires human beings and technology, design, conceptual design that I haven't seen elucidated anywhere. Do you have any leads? Borchelt: This is both resource and time and infrastructure intensive. There's just no getting around it. My budget at the Whitehead, and this is typical for most institutions, is about between a half of a percent and one percent of the institutional budget. And in a corporate environment, it would not be unusual to see that being 7, 8, or 10%. Okay? So, when people say, "Why aren't we doing as good as Coca-Cola?" there's a very good answer. There are also some communications issues there, but that's the one I tell them first, because I want more money. One of things I would tell you is, find Kathy Geiger, and pump her for all the information you can about how Brookhaven has managed public dialogue in their community. She was not able to get to all of the stuff that they had been doing over the last 3 years, 4 years, since the abrupt termination of the original contract with the original contractor at Brookhaven. But they put into place very sophisticated - initially expensive to put in place but long-term, the costs have come down considerably - ways of managing and monitoring the dialogue within that community, with a wide variety of stake holders. And I think the emphasis hasn't been on managing that dialogue as much as it has been on participating in the dialogue. Borchelt: Yeah. Question: Would you please repeat the title and author of the book you mentioned at the beginning that you just reviewed for The Science Writer? Borchelt: Daniel
Greenberg, Science, Money and Politics - and there's a colon and a harsh
statement that I can't remember off hand. Dan delights in tweaking the
noses of science officialdom, and it's an excellent book that every person
who deals with federal money ought to read. Yet, I disagree a little bit.
Porter: I think our next question is over here, please. Question: Hi, Rick. I look forward to working with you in Boston, because I'm at the Museum of Science, and actually have a National Institutes of Health SEPA grant, and the Whitehead Institute is one of our partners, and the whole purpose of the SEPA grant program is to have partnerships between research institutions and public education, outreach institutions so we can bring researchers in to meet directly with the public in the museum. And my question has to do with those of us who are primarily educators and not public agencies or government agencies doing research. Our target audience is not just that attentive public. We're really looking to reach more than that - to bridge the gap between the people who don't have access to all the information and don't have, necessarily, the background. And I was wondering how you would apply - whether your work applies to the kind of work that we are doing as educators and disseminators to that larger public, in any way? Borchelt: Two responses to that: I think all of our research suggests that if you miss out on getting children before they reach middle school or high school, all the adult literacy programs in the world aren't going to help you. That science - particularly mass-meditated programs to improve science literacy have no impact on adults. There are very few programs, even at community-based institutions, like museums and learning centers that have a lasting impact on adult science literacy. So, most of my remarks are aimed at adult science literacy programs or programs that purport to increase adult scientific literacy. I think we recognized, and we made a conscious decision early on in the R2 program, that there was a rich and exciting, vibrant literature about science education at the non-adult level that really deserved to be explored, and that we needed to explore, but didn't think that we had the resources or the constitution to be able to do. There's been a lot
of exciting research there, and I'm not personally familiar enough with
it to be able to respond to that, but my sense it that one of the big
problems - one of the things we did notice as we reviewed a number of
university museums and learning center type environments was there was
not a very good metrics base and benchmarking base to figure out what
was going on. We had, for example there was a - and I don't think anyone's
here from CERN, maybe they're listening on the Web cast, in which case,
they'll be embarrassed, but that's okay. I had an exciting interaction
with folks from this huge particle physics laboratory in Europe called
CERN, and they put together a beautiful high physics, high-energy physics
program that was a site exhibit that traveled. It was in Geneva, and they
had it in Florence, I think, and they did all the right things. They did
the pre test, and they sent people through the exhibit to do the post
test, and lo and behold, nothing changed. But going through this exhibit,
because the exhibit was written at such a high level, no one there could
approach it at all. So, there was nothing in there that appealed to the
audience that was supposed to be going through there, but they thought
it was very successful because it taught them that they needed to do a
better job of educating the public to understand their exhibit. Porter: I think there was a question over here. Someone had their hand up earlier. Question: I did. Right here. Porter: Oh, you have the mic. Go ahead. Question: I completely agree with your comments that there's not just one audience out there. There's many audiences, and we need to communicate on many different levels, but realistically, in an age of dwindling budgets and limited resources, limited people-power, do you have some thought or recommendations on how we can develop, instead of a one-size-fits-all, maybe a one-size-fits-many model for communications to maximize on what we have? Borchelt: Yeah,
you focus on the science attentive public, because every dollar that you
spend there you have collateral damage in other audience categories. And
I think that to write to that audience tends to be the audience that does
the most for you, and that's, I think true of almost everyone here in
the audience; that that audience is critical to us. I don't think there
is a one-size-fits-many strategy or approach, either. I really think that
you're in a position of, for god's sake, be a strategist for a change.
Most institutions hire tacticians to do the work. They do not hire strategists.
And what we need to be doing is promoting ourselves as strategists, not
as tacticians. We need to make that's true and that we are acting strategically,
but that's what we need to do. If you have to decide what your most important
audience is, you need to go to your management and say, "This is
our most important audience," and "Yes, I don't care about,"
you know, "Topeka Kansas. I'm sorry." And make no bones about
it. Question: Can I go? I'm Mary Hanson from NSF. It would be helpful, I suppose, to know just what this attentive audience - Jon Miller, are you listening? - is reading and watching, you know, so we know how to target them. A quick comment about Greenberg for the people that are interested in his book, and I have a question for you about money, if I dare ask it publicly. Greenberg, Daniel S. Greenberg, that's G-R-E-E-N-B-E-R-G, who wrote the book that Rick mentioned, is on Amazon.com, and a lot of reviews have been done, and I highly recommend it, too, because I brought him in to NSF to speak, which was a bit of a bold risk, because he was critical of us and all federal agencies, but, it was - and the NSF director attended, and he was - Dan Greenberg, for those of you who know him, that's enough said. But, it's a good book to get. Borchelt: Pulls no punches. Hanson: That's right. He tells it like it is, and we can all use that. The question is about this, the R2 group, because I'm so grateful, because like many of us, for years I've been just craving some way to inform what we do, rather than the "ad hoc" way we normally do business. In it's future, does it really need $900K to stay afloat? Or do you have any, like, sugar daddies in the wings that you - [laughter] - and I'm not offering NSF. I do not have the power to do that, but I'm thinking about how do we help make sure this keeps going? Borchelt: About two-thirds of that, actually, was in support and maintenance of a prototype Web site, which is science@nasa.gov - science.nasa.gov, or science@nasa, and Ron Kozar has an exhibit here that you can go and look at that, and it really is, I think, still a model of how to do science communication about a particular field, in this case space science, to a relatively broad audience. So, that's about as close as - an Earth observatory does the same thing. I mean, there's - there is - that is oriented at a science-attentive audience, but you're not going to get Mom and Pop just sort of sitting down, or "Instead of watching Warner Bros. tonight and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I'm going to go to the Earth observatory." You know, it's a different kind of an audience. What this requires, I think, and we actually met, I guess, eight times at different research institutions as an R2 group. The costs were relatively well contained. It doesn't cost a mint to do that. This conference was probably our biggest single cost, and the reason it's a big single cost is because we wanted to make it as attractive and broadly based as possible. We subsidized as many of the costs as we could, within reason, to be able to get you here. While, although your registration pays for a good part of the conference cost. What we would be able - you know, we're looking at probably less than $200,000 a year over three years, four years, to continue doing this as a bi-annual activity, including some of the research component. The research component in this, which was, you know, for those of you who do science, $50,000 in social sciences gives you so much more than $50,000 in high-energy physics. I was just shocked! I was like, "I can do ten projects for $50K? Oh my god! I couldn't even get in the lab door for $50k at Whitehead!" So, that's not the big expensive investment, but the Federal Government has not invested, universities and state governments have not invested in that research, either, and it's a very under-funded area. Borchelt: Yep. Last question. Miller: Rick, - Borchelt: Oh, I'm sorry. Miller: Let me just say one very brief thing about the attentive public. Many of the institutions that are here actually already serve the attentive public. They just don't know it. The attentive public, as Rick suggested, are people who are information seekers, and many of the people, in fact, who come the museums are, in fact, members of the attentive public. So the museums, although they often think they don't serve the attentive public, in fact, do. And the attentives bring their children to museums, which is another activity that often happens. One of the things you need to remember is that there's 200 million adults in the country, so every percentage point is 2 million people. So, when you have 12% of the people who are attentive, that's 24 million people, which is a huge audience. Borchelt: I agree. And civically active. Miller: And who are aggressively seeking information by and large, so that many of you who sell magazines or have conferences or do things or have events will find that the people who come in to the events are, in fact, the attentive public. And one of the things I think we mistakenly do is we dumb down the information and audience that would really like to have more sophisticated information and are, in fact, capable of handling it. So, it sometimes is important to remember that the audience that comes in may, in fact, be attentive, because the attendance for museums, for example, is not randomly distributed. It's a very high education profile relative to the society, generally. Borchelt: Absolutely. I think one of the biggest mistakes we do make is - I hate the term "dumbing down," but you know, needlessly translating for an audience that would prefer not to have a translation. Last question. Yes, here. Question: Thank you. In terms of science-attentive public, from your research, do you have any examples of how these people do, sort of, have a tickle-down effect and continue on the dialogue with other groups in the community? Given the nature of them. Borchelt: The quickest and fastest impact that we're able to see, I think, is they're the people who write to their members of congress. They are people who take information and put it into some behavioral category. So, they will write members of congress, they will write local regulatory boards, they will write when there are issues that have an impact on science. They will write in support of a funding bill, which, believe me, is a difficult thing to get people to do. They will attend a public meeting on groundwater issues, they will - and say something at that meeting, not just sit there. That's the kind of impact that we see. There are a number of professional societies based in Washington or who operate within the Washington environment, who bring in various members of their membership who are science-attentive in a very active, advocacy role, and that has worked rather well for them, too, if they pick the right people and give them the training to do so. And there are some Australian examples. For example, Toss Gasgoin (sp?) does a really good "meet the legislators" kind of a program, and that's the same kind of people he's looking at, is scientists and their advocates and the third-party validators coming in to meet with funders and policy makers to do that. Questioner: Thank you. Borchelt: You
bet. Thank you very much. I've appreciated the chance to talk with you
this morning. Enjoy the rest of the conference. Transcript
for next talk Created:
7/25/01
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