SpotOn London 2012 (#solo12): Starting a Conversation

Happy Advent everyone. We've got lots of fun lined up for the run-up to Christmas. At SpotOn London 2012 I had my first attempt at bringing together a group of people from diverse backgrounds to put on a panel discussion about the many demands placed on scientific researchers #solo12jobs. I've been collecting my thoughts on this exciting new experience and the things I learned from it.

Name: Jonathan Lawson

Date: 11^th and 12^th November

Location: Wellcome Conference Centre, London

Website: http://www.nature.com/spoton/in/london/

One thing that really makes the SpotOn conferences different from the norm is the community centred scheduling. SpotOn London has no posters and no presentations, just a few keynote lectures and the rest is all about discussion sessions, panels and workshops.

SpotOn London 2012 provided me with my first chance to host a session, including selecting a panel and choosing the subject for our discussion. I was very excited to be co-organising this with recent PhD graduate, Heather Doran, from Aberdeen University. We've both spent a lot of time, during our studies, on advancing the cause of science communication and encouraging researchers to talk more about their work, particularly through our university science magazines, BlueSci and AU Science.

The idea for our session was born at the UKCSJ over the summer, in discussion with SpotOn organiser Lou Woodley. We realised that it would be novel and exciting to provide a stage to highlight to researchers the importance of incorporating science outreach into their work and to examine what has been done and what more could be done to encourage this. We also wanted to back this up with our own thoughts on how best to achieve the balance between doing science and talking about it.

After some deliberation and discussion, this crystallised into the Juggling Jobs session (#solo12jobs), we were even able to come up with a sufficiently sensible sounding proposal for the SpotOn website. Despite this, it was still quite uncertain how the discussion would actually go but, as we learned, this is an intrinsic factor of these sessions. Thankfully, our proposal was accepted onto the Policy strand of SpotOn London and this helped to really direct our thoughts towards the importance of policy in encouraging scientists to multitask. By this I don't just mean government politics but everything about the ways in which different organisations approach and perceive science communication. Thus we chose to consider the influence of governments and funding bodies as well as the internal policy of different institutions and departments. It is well known, that up until recently, funding bodies and institutions generally encouraged researchers to spend as much time as possible on their work. This has begun to change in recent years but we wanted to know how different people experienced that, what has changed and how this has been brought about.

Our next problem? Finding an experienced panel to talk in the session. We knew we wanted people to speak from a range of viewpoints. We wanted to represent the full spectrum of academic careers from PhD to lab head, as well as to represent different institutions and experience of different national systems. We contacted a lot of people and whilst some were unable to attend, we had a lot of positive responses. So many responses came back that, unfortunately, we were unable to include everyone in the final program! To add to myself, near the start of my PhD and Heather, at the end of hers, we found Anne Osterrieder and Brian Wecht who were kind enough to talk about their experiences as post-doctoral researchers. We topped this off with Jenny Rohn, a new principal investigator at UCL and world-renowned physicist Athene Donald, from the University of Cambridge. Heather and I were both very surprised by the enthusiasm we had in response to our requests for panellists and were really pleased to find that so many were interested in joining the conversation.

From there on, we worked on doing some planning, condensing all of our ideas into a few key thoughts and questions to guide our session. Doing this for the first time was a very odd experience. It's very different from the usual practice of structuring and preparing presentations because you're not totally certain what your panel is going to say or what feedback you'll get from the audience. We were very keen to ensure that our discussion was highly interactive and so didn't want it to be too corseted by the directions we thought it should go in. The important thing, which I think we realised quite late on, is to know exactly how you want to kick-off your discussion in a way that sets the scene and doesn't mean you all just sit there and look at each other for the first half an hour. We did realise this in time, and this isn't what happened.

We really should have tried to arrange a direct discussion between all of our panellists one final time before the event itself, but actually it was quite interesting to see how we responded to each other's thoughts and opinions in a way that wasn't too influenced by our prior interactions. It is very easy for a discussion to sound scripted if the panellists have discussed it too much in advance and already know each other's opinions. So, after successfully hunting down all of our panellists on the day at SpotOn and corralling them into a room together, we finally got our session underway.

After a round of introductions, Prof. Donald got us started by giving her perspective on how opinions of science communication have changed throughout her career from unheard of to ignored and ridiculed, onto an uneasy acceptance with the occasional instances resounding support that can be seen today. From there it just flowed, I did get a bit worried in the beginning that audience participation was going to be a challenge, but we opened them up eventually. This just left a slightly strenuous multi-tasking test whereby I had to keep track of the conversation, make sure that the microphones could pick-up the people speaking, look for who to go to in the audience and think of where to direct the conversation next, whilst also putting in my own thoughts. Yet, in all honesty, I think I enjoyed it more than a standard presentation and it made it seem like the allocated time passed very quickly indeed.

It takes some getting used to but a discussion is a very different experience, it doesn't need to be prepared like a lecture. There's always other people to pick up on the things you say and take them further, there's no slides to prepare and usually you're talking on a subject that you're so interested in that you don't really need to do much to plan or prepare your arguments. Although it is always good to have a few thoughts and topics lined-up just in case things start getting a bit quiet.

The real challenge is trying to make sure everyone has their fair say and ensuring that you don't just end up with people talking over each other. The final few days before the event were very weird though, in that I constantly felt there was more I should be doing to prepare interesting points to say or plan more thoroughly, but in the end it was interactive and engaging with a lot of involvement from many different people. I expect I'll need to do this a few more times before I really start to get used to how these sessions work, but I certainly look forward to giving it another try.

Oh, and finally, some closing thoughts from the session. I didn't have time to really wrap up at the time and I know that I really should have done. - It's easier than ever for researchers to talk to the public about science, there are tons of groups and initiatives as well as voluntary opportunities like science festivals. Yet there can still be a lot of academic prejudice against outreach, particularly in some groups or faculties (although perhaps Chemists are a little better than we suggested at the time). It has been some time since students have needed to actively hide outreach activities from their supervisors, but many are still far from encouraging, although, in this respect Heather and I have both been very fortunate. Support has been growing in recent years as a new generation of scientists rises through the ranks and many universities are now beginning to appoint researchers to communications intensive roles, such as those now held by Anne and Brian.

In the UK, funding bodies are really helping to drive progress by requiring researchers to outline how they will share their work, but this is a very progressive state and many nations, especially the US appear to be lagging severely behind in these areas. Finally, we feel there is a place for science communication facilitators, but they must be supported by the scientists around them and must, themselves, be well informed and experienced. They should be able to act like catalysts, helping to enthuse the academics they work with and connecting them with worthwhile projects. It is also true, that for a select few scientists it may be in the best interests of everyone for them to stay away from talking to the public and stick to the day job, but you never know until you give it a try.

(Logo from conference website. Photos of inspirational message at the Wellcome collection and #solo12jobs cupcake with others from the Policy strand were provided by the author).

More information from all SpotOn London sessions has been collected here.