Online Engagement

Hannah Little

H.R.Little@sms.ed.ac.uk

@hanachronism

Lessons from the Science Communication Conference 2011

Online Engagement

• 16-24 feel the least engaged in Science

• This age group gets the majority of their information from the internet

Creating a Community

Is the best way to engage the public online to create an interactive website with a message board, blog, wiki etc.

?

How do you build a community?

Mark Zuckerberg: You can’t.

Engagement Must be Bottom-Up

• Audiences may resent you if you try to impose things on them.

• Research has shown that kids don’t want educational things infringing on social media.

• Children much more likely to respond if talking to each other rather than a higher authority.

Is an excellent tool to use to get audiences to share amongst themselves rather than feel like they are being imposed on.

Look at Northhampton University’s Periodic Table of Videos.

http://www.youtube.com/user/periodicvideos

Fancy Bespoke Sites

• Are you trying to build a community from scratch?

• Separating yourself from already existing communities?

• Why not take your entire web output to facebook?

• Created their own web portal• People didn’t join in

– You can’t create their own community.

• They now use already existing communities such as twitter

• Letting people have input and interaction through twitter has increased their audience

Blogs

• Blogs are the new thing. Everyone wants one.

• Tricky for professional organisations– They don’t want an output of un-peer-

reviewed information being posted but want public engagement.

Wikis

• In the past decade a favourite thing to do has been to create your own specialist wikis.

• These have covered Medicine, Cancer Research, Linguistics etc.

• These require time and effort from experts to input the information before it’s even useful to the public.

Solution?

• Encourage the experts who you work with to edit the already existing and highly successful wiki, WIKIPEDIA.

• Also a solution to the problem of a lot of false information on wikipedia.

Some extra thoughts…

• Encourage researches to include public engagement as part of grant proposals and funding agencies to value it.

• Will encourage more public engagement and gain more funding for public engagement extra to the falling funding for public engagement specific grants.

Thanks!