Imagine an audience of several thousand researchers, policy-makers, educators and members of the public gathering to hear and talk about science, its applications and its impacts. Imagine discussing your work with this audience. If that idea appeals to you, keep reading, and act on what follows by the end of this month.

When a small group of researchers launched the Euroscience lobbying organization in 1997 (see http://www.euroscience.org), no one envisaged that its most visible manifestation would be a meeting that has steadily evolved and grown in importance over the years: the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF). Since its launch in Stockholm in 2004, the biennial meeting has attracted a larger and more diverse range of participants, retaining a central focus on the natural sciences but with increasing attention to industry and the social sciences.

At the last meeting, in Turin in 2010, there were more than 4,000 attendees from 71 countries. According to surveys of the attendees, the 120-plus scientific sessions attracted high ratings for interest and comprehensibility and for the variety of themes. The number of journalists attending has grown to more than 300.

Europe's cities have competed to host the meeting. Next year's, on 12–16 July 2012, will be in Dublin (see http://www.dublinscience2012.ie).

Whatever the current financial situation, over the past decade Ireland's investment in science has grown at double the rate of the rest of its economy. This has seen the quantity and impact of the country's scientific publications grow over the past five years, and resulted in marked improvements in the international rankings of its universities. The Irish government has backed ESOF2012 energetically from the start.

Some of the themes of ESOF2012 address the frontiers of scientific knowledge. They include, for example, the power and limitations of our knowledge of the genotype with respect to our understanding of the phenotype, deep-space astronomy, quantum computation, and information science. Other themes are more philosophical: the concept of free will in cognitive science; how science provides meaning; whether e-mail is the end of history. Still others lie at the forefront of applications — 'nutriceuticals' and other innovative aspects of food, and, of course, the science and the issues surrounding energy, environment and the climate.

These themes provide a framework, but the creative spark in the ESOF meeting has always arisen in the sessions, in which researchers and others have often provoked vigorous but critically minded interest — the audiences are far from passive.

A typical session involves four panellists discussing science or technologies and the issues they give rise to. In past years, competition to run scientific sessions has been fierce, with a rejection rate for the 2010 meeting of about 50%. Encouragingly, the traffic to the proposals website shows that there is already substantial interest for the meeting next year. Readers are encouraged to submit their own proposals — instructions are at http://go.nature.com/wq39ya.