Welcome to Econnect Communication’s June/July 2004 newsletter.

Jenni and Michelle are back from the Public Communication of Science and Technology conference (www.pcst2004.org) and from their cycling adventure around Spain. This newsletter includes highlights of their experiences at the conference.

The PCST network aims to:

· To foster public communication of science and technology (PCST).

· To encourage discussion of practices, methods, ethical issues, policies, conceptual frameworks, economic and social concerns, and other issues related to PCST.

· To link practitioners of PCST, researchers who study PCST, and scientific communities concerned with PCST.

· To link those from different cultures and countries worldwide, in both developed and developing parts of the world, concerned with PCST.

· To provide opportunities for meetings, electronic interactions, and collaborations among people interested in PCST.

This conference brings together a diverse range of professionals so it is not surprising that they experience the event very differently. The contributions in this newsletter edition reflect some of this diversity.

For anyone that is interested in reading more articles about the PCST conference, you can visit http://www.imim.es/quark/num32/default.htm or http://www.scidev.net/News/index.cfm?fuseaction=readnews&itemid=1417&lan.

If you have any feedback or ideas you’d like to add to our newsletter, we’d love to hear from you – especially if you have inspiring things to contribute to our next month’s edition.

Regards,

Econnect Communication

Jenni Metcalfe, Michelle Riedlinger, Terri Telford

June – July 2004

1. The PCST Network evolves – by Jenni Metcalfe

2. Science policies and communication: some observations – by Michelle Riedlinger

3. Too much transmitting, not enough receiving – by Michael Duffy

4. PCST Experiences – by Toss Gascoigne

5. Public Communication of Science & Technology 8

6. Contact Us

1. The PCST Network evolves

By Jenni Metcalfe

The first meeting of the PCST (Public Communication of Science & Technology) Network was in Poitiers France in 1989 involving 130 participants from 14 countries. Since that time PCST Network conferences have been held about every two years, with the most recent 8th conference being held in Barcelona in early June this year. This latest conference had almost 600 registrants representing more than 50 countries.

My first experience with the network was in April 1994 at the Montreal conference in Canada. I was appointed to the scientific committee of the Network at the next conference, which we were successful in winning for Melbourne, Australia in 1996. It has been interesting to watch and participate in the development of the network since that time.

The conferences have certainly got bigger and better organised and there is much more input from the scientific committee in reviewing papers and commenting on draft programs. There is a relatively active email list and a website (www.pcstnetwork.org).

At a meeting in Barcelona prior to the conference, the scientific committee approved somewhat more formal structures for the functioning of the committee and its activities (see details on the website). We also approved the concept of having between-conference regional events. The first of these will be held in Beijing in late June 2005 and will be organised with the China Association for Science & Technology (CAST) and the SciDev.Net (who will be launching their China gateway next year).

The aims of the Beijing Symposium are to: (a) learn and share from practical success stories of science communication; (b) determine the common processes that generate positive results from science communication programs; and (c) convey all these results to the wider PCST Network and anyone else who is interested. The symposium will be limited to invited international speakers as well as local participants. However, there will be a call for ‘evidence’ internationally to identify key success stories that can then be reviewed academically.

The scientific committee also signed off on the concept of creating a virtual PCST Academy to examine the challenges and issues faced by the public communication of science today. This academy would provide virtual and actual places for debate, meetings for researchers and professionals, and would issue keynote theoretical and practical publications. The concept is still in its infancy but promises to offer exciting opportunities for international debates and publications on matters of interest to many of us.

The committee is hoping that the PCST Network will become much more than just biennial conferences – that things will continue to happen in between times. But the conferences will remain the focal activity of the network and we’re all looking forward to Seoul, South Korea on 17-20 May, 2006 (see www.pcst2006.org) where the theme is “Scientific Culture for Global Citizenship’. The 10th PCST will be held in Los Angeles, USA in 2008 and will make the most of this location with its theme: “Science and Popular Culture: Engaging the Public”.

2. Science policies and communication: some observations

By Michelle Riedlinger

Interactions between science communication and science policies were high on the agenda at PCST8. One parallel session contained nine speakers over a two- hour period, and this might have limited the capacity for lively discussion, were it not for an expert facilitator and some very engaging participants.

Rick Borchelt from the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research, USA (URL: http://www.wi.mit.edu/home.html) gave an excellent account of his research into information reception by US politicians. From in-depth interviews with 300 politicians he found that the least trusted source of scientific information was a story on the national broadcast news.

US politicians were very savvy with using the web and relied on electronic communication, including email, as a primary or secondary source of information nearly half of the time.

Other trusted sources of scientific information were reports from the National Academy of Science, articles in technical journals, news reports on NOVA (the public broadcasting organisation) and articles in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

Brian Trench from Dublin City University, Ireland (URL: http://www.dcu.ie/) spoke about the growing trend by governments to embrace the knowledge-driven economy concept. He believed that policies developed around this concept narrowed the definition of science to the generation of income, excluding many moral, social and ethical aspects of science that needed attention.

Panel member discussion indicated that community participation in science could be hindered under these policies. Innovation policies could also impact negatively on other policies encouraging collaboration and partnerships as these collaborations would only work when the partnerships supported the innovation policy agenda. Funding regimes did not allow for time to be available to work through issues of benefit and application.

If not carefully managed, innovation policies were believed to threaten democratic participation in discussions about knowledge application of science in general. These competing policies of innovation and collaboration encouraged communication breakdowns that were detrimental to research project outcomes.

Fiona Barbagallo from the BA in the UK (http://www.the-ba.net/the-ba) discussed the challenges her organisation faced with communicating research at the very early stages. Discussion with panel members focused on the role of education in supporting science in general but was not believed to be able to support specific science projects or areas. Upstream engagement was acknowledged as very difficult to manage as it needed direct and deliberative communication and this took substantial time and resources that were often unavailable.

Panel members and those attending this session indicated that what was often missing from science policies was:

· an acknowledgement that social welfare issues are very different from those associated with competitiveness

· associated funding available for the public discussion of issues

· dialogue around science, consisting of more than elites.

Under these policies, science was often presented as instrumentalist instead of an activity guided, developed and undertaken by individuals and institutions.

In addition, many countries, including Australia, claim that they have a shortage of scientists and therefore need to recruit young people to the area to support the knowledge-based economy, however, adequate funding for scientific positions was more of an issue for these delegates than a lack of bright and innovative personnel.

3. Too much transmitting, not enough receiving

By Michael Duffy

You’d have to be mad to pass up the chance of going to a conference in Barcelona.

When I saw the ads for Public Communication of Science and Technology’s eighth effort, I got my registration in early and hunted down the cheapest airfare I could find.

And then, of course, I had to work out how to pay for it.

Barcelona is the city celebrated in Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, in Robert Hughes’ comprehensive homage, ‘Barcelona’ and more recently in Zafon’s ‘Shadow of the Wind’.

The city lived up to expectations: the Gaudi buildings, the throngs of tourists, the Barri Gothic, the workers’ bars in La Barceloneta - as Michelle Riedlinger will testify – and the museums and galleries.

Unfortunately, the conference didn’t quite get there.

As a non-Indigenous professional communicator operating in Aboriginal Australia, I was looking forward to some serious dialogue about communicating across cultural boundaries.

Where I work, in the Northern Territory, we’re continually redefining our ways of working.

We’ve finally twigged that it’s as important to listen and learn – to receive, in other words - as it is to transmit.

We find we have to be about sharing knowledge and respectfully exploring other knowledge systems instead of simply assuming that everyone wants to hear what we have to say.

And at PCST 8, unlike PCST 7 in Cape Town in 2002, there was far too much transmitting, precious little receiving and very little real dialogue about how you work effectively across cultures.

One of the few mentions of ‘local knowledge’ highlighted the use of traditional healers in an Asian country as an opportunity for its national government to save money on health services!

In the formal sessions of the conference, there wasn’t enough cultural diversity among the presenters: far too many academics and postgraduate students, very few people from other cultures and far, far too much lecturing.

The opening event – hastily moved to a venue in the city when it became clear that the planned venue (the National Science Museum) had yet to be built – was an unfortunate foretaste of how it was going to go.

We got a long lecture on what the museum was going to be about and a lot of rhetoric about the values of communicating science.

Naturally, the off-course action – the networking and socialising – more than made up for it.

But we’re doing our diverse communities a disservice if we talk about ‘Science’ as if it’s a value or a commodity to be sold at all costs.

Science is knowledge and knowledge is to be shared, to be sure.

But communicating that knowledge should involve a process of sharing respectfully and learning as well as teaching, particularly but not exclusively in cross-cultural settings.

If we can’t do that, we as communicators run the risk of replicating colonialism by proselytizing a creed as remote from the diverse peoples of our little corner of the world as the one that arrived here in the late 18th Century.

4. PCST Experiences

By Toss Gascoigne

Australians have played a prominent part in the PCST conferences for the last ten years, and hosted the conference in Melbourne in 1996. Australians always represent one of the biggest national contingents at PCST meetings.

They bring with them a well-deserved reputation for good work at the practical end of science communication. Australians seem particularly skilled at finding solutions to enduring problems in the area, and our strength is in contrast to the more academic approach of our European colleagues. (That's probably why they like us so much!)

They talk about discourse and dialogue: "an analysis of the theoretical and epistemological implications of feminist studies..." This language is largely absent in Australian science communication circles. (It does point to two weaknesses: our lack of a theoretical framework, theirs of a practical output.)

This year the conference was big (650 delegates, the biggest yet), impressively equipped (simultaneous translations in plenary AND workshop sessions) and beautifully located in the magical city of Barcelona.

Delegates came from over 60 countries. The big hitters were (in order): Spain, UK, Brazil, USA, Italy, Australia, Mexico, South Africa, France, and Portugal.

There is a strong local and language pull, which explains the delegations from the Spanish-speaking world. These conferences galvanise the local population into activity, one of the enduring benefits from hosting such a meeting.

What did they talk about? The theme was "Scientific Knowledge and Cultural Diversity", and that covered a huge range.

I chaired parallel session 28, which included five people who had conducted surveys on science awareness in Europe and South America; a German who talked about the theory of framing (perspective) in discussing communication, and an American who advocated more science training for the legal profession because of the increasing scientific nature of many legal cases.

Jenni Metcalfe helped organise a workshop on training scientists in communication skills, and this included a professor of science communication from London, a former Portuguese Minister for Science, and the Englishman who invented art on the buses of Bristol.

The sessions tend to blur now. What remains are the wonderful camaraderie, the chance to meet people who address these issues from different perspectives, and the magical city of Barcelona, where you rarely sit down to dinner before 10 pm.

PCST Conference 2006 is in Seoul, and after that in Los Angeles in 2008. So - become a science communicator and see the world!

5. Public Communication of Science & Technology 8

By Anne Leitch

The theme of this conference was ‘scientific knowledge and cultural diversity’ and I noticed a real shift in the tenor and type of presentation from previous PCST conferences. There seemed to a lot more papers with elements of engagement and evaluation, which I felt represented a positive shift towards a more reflective discipline.

Sessions were mixed in their impact. This conference was conducted differently to previous PCST conferences – the papers were circulated prior to the conference and speakers presented issues raised by their paper, rather than the paper itself (it was assumed that workshop participants had already read the papers). When this worked it worked really well and resulted in some very useful discussion. A great bonus from this structure is that you can make a more informed choice of sessions and you already have the papers from sessions you didn’t manage to attend.

The main new initiative from this conference was the establishment of new organisation: Barcelona will host the first headquarters of an International Academy Science & Society (provisional name). This new organisation will be responsible for the creation of the documentary basis of the PCST network and will prepare reports on particular relevant issues for communication and social understanding of science.

Located in the same precinct as the conference was Forum Barcelona – remarkably like Expo it was an amazing community event of conferences, public displays, music and performances including loads of street theatre. I was followed by a giant dragonfly, saw a performance of ‘Creature from the Seven Seas’ which must have been inspired by Kevin Costner’s ‘Waterworld’, and found a display of the future as seen through the eyes of Spanish eight year olds…

6. Contact Us

Econnect Communication works with science, environment, ecotourism and natural resource management agencies to:

evaluate and develop communication strategies
write and design products that meet audience needs
run workshops that train staff and management in communication skills

Contact us: phone 07 3846 7111; email admin@econnect.com.au

Website: http://www.econnect.com.au

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