Graham Farmelo
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Graham Farmelo. I’m adjunct professor of physics at Northeastern University and also a consultant based in London. One of my projects has been to be one of the co-directors of Closing the Gap. And it’s been a great privilege for me to be instrumental in these proceedings, which I for one have very much enjoyed and hope you have too. Now with a final session on Saturday, separating you from your Saturday night on the town in Boston, so we realize we’ve got a challenge, but one we’re sure we’re going to be equal to.
Time magazine last month won a lot of publicity when it named its Person of the Year in 2006 as You. Now, that was in the long tradition of Time magazine people of the year that included outstanding individuals such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Josef Stalin. The editor of Time made this comment in justifying the choice of You as being Person of the Year. He said, "It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. " And this community and collaboration has been made possible by digital networked technology, something that has only been coming to the fore in the last 10 to 15 years. And it is changing so many aspects of life in the industrialized world, and increasingly through the developing world. One thinks of the burgeoning of cell-phone transactions in Africa, for example.
Every branch of society today is being affected, slowly but surely. Pick three examples: news, medicine, and even the way we appoint our entertainment stars. No longer do we want the craggy voice of Walter Cronkite telling us how it is. Now we, the public, want to inform the news people about what we think they’re telling us. With medicine, our local practitioners also get the benefit of what we said after consulting Dr. Google. And for rock stars, no longer do people fight their way up through the dirty caverns or university clubs. Now they go on TV, and through Simon Cowell and Co. we feed back the people whom we want to be our American Idols.
Science and technology are being changed no less than those other enterprises. And today that’s why I think it’s particularly apposite that we’re talking about the public’s role in the scientific enterprise, your role in that enterprise, if you like.
I want to sweep away sentiment straightaway from this. Many people here, just while you’re attending, will think, Oh, this is an interesting topic. But the role is relatively new as perceived by some scientists (for example, Lord Rutherford, arguably as great an experimental physicist as Einstein was a theoretician). Einstein said that the main contribution of the public to science is to provide money. He was being understated. He probably meant the only contribution. He said, and he said quite unashamedly, he would stand here and say this very bluntly to you now: "The public doesn’t know enough and probably doesn’t care enough. It’s just not worth getting into. As long as you give me the money, we’ll turn out the discoveries. " He even opposed popularization. He thought it was a waste of time. But he wasn’t as extreme as the discoverer of x-rays, Wilhelm Röntgen, who said that the more the public knows about science, the worse it is for society. He said that in 1900, after making one of the most momentous discoveries of the century.
But we have moved on now. There is a proven appetite for science and technology for the public, not just in the gizmos it generates, in the treatments it generates through medicine, what have you, but through the sheer joy of knowledge that comes out of its machinations. We see that through all the different media that are represented here at the conference, and in the sales of science books, which are flourishing but nonetheless very modest compared with the sales of many other topics.
One of the reasons why scientists have come round, at least in their politically correct utterances, is that a failure to connect has proven to be very serious. Everyone knows examples of where failure to connect with the public has led to calamitous consequences for scientists, and sometimes for the public. I’m thinking, for example, of if you’re a stem-cell scientist, right at the forefront of knowledge, and you have your federal resources withdrawn, or you have your license to practice withdrawn, you are really shafted. Or if you’re a particle physicist and you’re working on the supercollider of 13 years ago, looking forward to making momentous discoveries, and then after spending (what is it?) $2 billion or $3 billion your funding is just cut because the representatives on Capitol Hill don’t think it’s worth doing. That one in particular is absolutely calamitous for the scientists. On the other hand, if now you’re working in the field of sustainable development or climate change, you know that with the huge tsunami of public interest and awareness in that topic now, that research funds in those fields are going to be forthcoming. So it really is worth scientists and the public connecting, if only out of self-interest among scientists.
So what might the questions be that we address today, in addition to that of the public actually being able to do scientific research—which can happen. There are examples of that which we won’t discuss today. Audience members might want to give examples. But we want to discuss today the ways in which scientists and the public can come together, particularly in influencing policy and advancing the science that scientists actually do in their workplace. What are the best ways of doing this, in an unsentimental way? What are the ways in which we can bring people with no or relatively little scientific expertise together with people who really are at the cutting edge? How do we make sure that that coming together is well informed and open? And third, and perhaps hardest, how can we make those comings together instrumental in informing public policy, so that it’s not just an instance of talking shop but something that is meaningful to the public at large?
Now, I for one always feel excited when I’m talking about this public engagement topic when I’m in the United States, because as Al Gore reminded us in his opening remarks, in a sense the United States, through the Constitution and the work of the Founding Fathers, is something that was forged as part of the crucible of the Enlightenment.
One of the Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, was perhaps the most notable example of a public figure who was a very distinguished scientist and hero to many scientists, it has to be said. In Philadelphia, he founded a local philosophical society (it would now be called a scientific society) where he gave lectures, gave demonstrations, and talked to the public about what he did and their applications. He was the absolute epitome of the public-spirited scientist. And at a crucial stage in his life, he wrestled with whether he should be doing fundamental science or whether he should be working on public affairs.
So just imagine what he was like during one of his sojourns in Boston, if he were here today, sharing the excitement of the new digital network revolution. With his passions, can you imagine the kind of uses that Franklin and his associates would have had for the new world of blogs, podcasts, YouTube, MySpace, and the rest? Because I think we really are in the midst of a revolution—and I’m wary of that word. I think the word is thrown around much too freely. But I think that we really are entering a new world, a new information ecosystem, as Al Gore said. Al Gore mentioned yesterday that television is at the forefront. Yes, but if you look at the way things are changing at the moment, I think the culture of feedback, of participation through these media, is slowly but surely taking over. And it’s the way our young people, the great creators of the future, this is the way they are thinking. I think that we could quite possibly be going through a revolution where image (that’s the screen image) and digital network technology will be as important a force for change as the printing press was in the 17th century.
So what is the way in which we’re going to address this today? Well, our session is divided into two parts. First, we’ll be looking at strategy, broad topics in the field; and second, at some specific examples of what we regard as successful projects. We’re going to invite you very strongly to participate and give your views on these topics, and give us the benefit of your experience. So this is a two-way thing as well as a didactic presentation.
I’d just like to say that when we do take questions (you’ve probably heard this several times but it’s worth saying again), if I can see you, I will ask you to speak, and please wait until the microphone comes to you. And then when it does come, please give your name and ask your question briefly, and then we will get back to you.
Our first part is on the strategic aspects. We’re going to begin with Edna Einsiedel of the University of Calgary, who’s going to give us a review of bringing society back into science, largely from a North American perspective, but not exclusively. Then, from a more European perspective, Stef Steyaert from the Netherlands will be reviewing consensus conferences, which is an amazingly effective way of involving publics in debates on issues in science and technology. Stef is at the Flemish Institute of Science and Technology Assessment and has done an enormous amount of excellent work in this field. So we have two real experts to bring us first of all into the strategic realm of these fascinating new initiatives. First, let me ask you then to welcome Edna Einsiedel.
Edna Einsiedel
Thank you, Graham. It’s such a pleasure to be here. I’ve been running around between the various sessions, and a lot of the speakers have had really interesting things to say. Much of my work has focused on the life sciences, applications in biotechnology and genomics, and I’m more recently looking at emerging technologies like nanotechnology. I’m particularly interested, in how publics participate in policy decisions. I’m actually currently involved in a public consultation on plant molecular farming. It’s connected to the creation of a regulatory framework in Canada, to be done by the agricultural ministry. Now, plant molecular farming is the third generation of biotechnology applications, and it’s basically using transgenic plants for the production of drugs, vaccines, and industrial products. So here you have a fairly complicated subject, and we have two consultations that are ongoing at the same time. One is a face-to-face, sort of a modified citizen jury; and the second one is an online process that also involves some deliberation. So that’s a very exciting process, and I was very tempted to talk about that, but I will stick to what I was assigned to, to step back and look at some of the bigger issues around public participation.
I’m going to talk about four things this evening. The first is to just very briefly talk about the changing context of technology innovation. And then I’m going to talk about the rise of one particular form of public participation, and that is the use of deliberative models of public consultation. Then I’ll step back and talk more generally about trends in public participation and what their implications might be. So this is what the old model of science and innovation looks like. And here we can think of innovation in fairly simplistic, linear terms. Science was done in the lab; it was developed into an application, which was then taken to the marketplace. And the marketplace was basically where people then made their assessments. This is less true today than it was in the past. And I’m talking particularly about big science here. Here I’m referring to the applications of biotechnology, the life sciences, genomics, nanotechnology. With these examples you have the state, industry, and the scientific enterprise joining forces in what we now call the "Triple Helix " model. And their interests have been realigning in ways that sometimes work and sometimes don’t work for the benefit of society.
Here’s how I picture the new model of innovation. It’s a much more open and complex set of systems and actor-networks for doing science. In essence, what we have is a very messy model of science and innovation. Scientists are increasingly working together in large collaborative teams. Publics, politicians, bankers, and venture capitalists are increasingly inserting themselves in the process. And you have science more often being done in the agora, in the public space, where it is increasingly being discussed, dissected, and debated and judged. This is the case particularly with controversial science, and stem-cell research is a very good example, where the question essentially revolves around how scientists ought to carry out their research. Should they be working on adult stem cells? Should they be working on leftover embryos? Cloned embryos? And policies have had to be drawn up at these early stages as well.
Now, what about publics? Publics are also changing in terms of how they relate to science, how they understand science, and how they judge science and technology. Our publics today have more access to information than at any time previously. As Thomas Friedman observed, the world is flat. We have a global, Web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work, irrespective of time, distance, and, increasingly, language. In Canada today there are 22 million Internet users, and that’s out of a population of, I think, 32 million. This is as of December 2005. Two-thirds of the population is connected. And when I looked at the OECD statistics, I found out that Canada isn’t even in the top four connected countries, the top four being, I think, Iceland, the Netherlands, Finland, and South Korea.
So if science is now a network of collaborative or connected communities, one can certainly argue that society is as well. Graham referred to the Time magazine cover. This recent celebration of the connected individual in this connected world has been described in terms of, for example, the number of blogs that are ongoing. We have about 20 million blogs, and counting. It’s not surprising that Google has spent close to a billion dollars to buy up MySpace and to buy YouTube, making even more powerful the access and connectedness of the average Joe and Mary, or Maria.
At the same time that the average citizen has become more linked and networked, there has also been a major change in attitudes to authority. And I wish I had included the slides that I had of the Eurobarometer survey, which was on science and society. But political scientists have documented a decline in trust in authority and expertise, which they attribute to changing citizen expectations rather than the failure of governments. This skepticism has also been reflected in attitudes toward scientific authority, even though trust in science and scientists remains high. This empowered citizen, this skeptical citizen, has not been shy about acting on his or her own interests and relating these to science issues. Society has talked back to science in many different ways. People have taken to the streets, raised money for research, helped to channel research in particular directions (and I’m thinking here, for example, of the very activist AIDS communities that have moved the direction of research in particular ways), and they have taken the scientific community to task for health and environmental risks. The controversies around GM food, particularly in Europe, are well known. Here you see protestors against nanotechnology, and they’re basically calling attention to nano-based, wrinkle-free clothing sold in Eddie Bauer stores. And of course you’re familiar with the debates around stem-cell research, particularly in the United States.
It’s not surprising that a consequence of all these changes is a greater interest in finding ways to involve publics in the science and technology enterprise. So what are the trends in public engagement and participation? I’ll talk about these four trends: the greater number of efforts, the timing, the diversity of models, and the scope.
In terms of increasing efforts in public participation involving dialogue and deliberation, there has been a dramatic increase in public-participation models in the last two decades. And we’ve been particularly interested in forums that involve deliberation on science and technology issues, and discussions and engagement with scientists and other experts. These models have different names: "consensus conference " is one, "citizen jury " is another, "scenario workshops " is a third, and in the United States the development of the deliberative poll is another example. They all involve a number of elements. Front and center is a small group of citizens who learn about an issue. This is done through a briefing paper or a package of materials. But this is just a starting point, because our assumption has always been that these participants will do further research and reading on their own. They then go through a process of hearing from experts. And here I use the term "experts " advisedly, because in most of these deliberation models, the use of the term "experts " has included not just scientists but also legal experts, bioethicists, and members of civil society. They go through this process of hearing from experts, and this typically occurs as expert presentations followed by opportunities for questions and further discussion. This is followed by periods of deliberation among the citizen participants, after which they develop their recommendations and write a report.
The number of public consultations and participation initiatives has increased significantly in the last two decades. Here I’ve only included the list of countries that have used one model, the consensus conference, which you’ll hear more about. And I’ve also focused on just one or two topics in the area of biotechnology. Most of these consultations actually are on genetically modified food. As you can see, there’s quite a range of countries that have been experimenting with this approach. We looked at the online consultations going on in science and technology issues within a one-year period in Canada, and we found a wide variety of issues, from the review of the Food Guide to the Species At Risk Act to water quality for animal life to the ethics of research in humans to the regulation of pesticides to PGD (pre-implantation genetic diagnosis).
In addition to the numbers of consultations that are going on, the second change that we have noticed is the timing. When do you do these consultations? It used to be, of course, that public assessments occurred in the marketplace. That was the traditional model of innovation that I referred to earlier. We see a very different picture today, with "earlier is better " as the mantra. This is now called "upstream engagement. "
When the US government was developing legislation to provide a framework for nanotechnology research, it was striking that there was early consideration of the ethical and social implications of the technology, an important departure from earlier technology developments. It was in fact a prominent consideration in early discussions within a lot of the government agencies involved. The National Science Foundation sponsored a conference and a report in 2001 on the societal implications of nanotechnology. Interestingly, the 21st century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act does mandate this type of integration and participation.
These engagement activities have been occurring under the sponsorship of the Nanoscale Science Engineering and Technology subcommittee, and they partnered with the EPA, IAP2 (or the International Association for Public Participation), and the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, to sponsor an initial discussion on public participation, the framing of issues, and risk and science communications. This process was also going on in the United Kingdom, as the Royal Societies developed a position paper on nanotechnologies.
The third trend is the use of mixed models. And here I’ll just use the example of the Plant Molecular Farming Consultation that has been going on the last two years. This is the approach that our federal government has been using in Canada, and these are just some of the examples of the approaches used. We have a citizen jury that we are working on; an online citizen consultation across the country of 500 participants; we have had multi-stakeholder consultations; modified focus groups (and these are focus groups where the participants actually read through a briefing paper before the discussions). And of course there is the traditional public-opinion survey.
The fourth trend is the scope of these experiments. Science and technology issues can range from local to international. If you look at the Citizen Jury site of the Jefferson Center in Missouri (and they have specialized in use of the citizen jury as an approach), you will find communities from municipalities to statewide communities grappling with a variety of so-called local but also global issues. You will also hear one of our presenters talk about the consultation on brain science in Europe, which involved, I believe, 15 countries.
So let me pose this question. What is the value-add of these consultations? We’ve taken a look at the reports of the various citizen panels. And if you look at them, there are a number of things that are striking about these reports, and they’re very similar in terms of the kinds of themes that they raise. Many of these panel reports go beyond questions of safety or scientific efficacy. They raise questions about economic impacts, about their environmental consequences, about how technologies are governed. They’re not just interested in asking what risks; they ask who bears the risks, who enjoys the benefits. They ask about ethical issues implicated, about who controls the technology, and they raise questions about equity and access to technological benefits.
Now let me address what I think are the implications of the changes that I have described. What do public-participation initiatives do for societal decision-making and for the scientific enterprise? The old question that we have tended to ask is: How can we educate the public so that they will come around? How can we provide information so they will support science or make rational decisions? This is the old deficit model of publics, which has been roundly criticized. Let’s turn the question around. How and what can we learn from publics? How can our institutional practices accommodate or learn about new ways of considering publics? I suggested at the beginning that the sites at which problems are formulated and negotiated have moved from their previous institutional locations (like government, industry, or universities) into the agora, or the public space in which science meets the public, and the space where publics engage with science or talk back to science. This means that we can no longer rely on the old methods of interacting with publics.
I think these initiatives on public participation go beyond learning about science, and there are four values that I will just quickly go through. The first is foresight rather than hindsight, particularly if these are done early enough. The assessment of scientific work is done at the front end, what practitioners call "formative evaluation, " which is increasingly being done by society. The second addresses the issue of sustainability. How is sustainability defined? It has three legs to underpin the technical or scientific. Publics are asking about the economic, environmental, and social impacts as well. Accountability is another metric by which science and technology is judged. What ethical criteria need to be met in the doing of scientific work? What societal benefits accrue from this large investment? California voters, I’m sure, are very interested in finding out how the $3 billion in funds they approved for stem-cell research is being allocated and spent. And finally, there is the criterion of legitimacy. The interest around how to make decision-making more democratic extends to science and technology issues. Let me end with this little cartoon, which I’ve taken the liberty of adding a phrase to. It summarizes the case I’ve made, with scientists suggesting that they find it harder and harder to get any work done with all the ethicists and publics hanging around. Thank you very much.
Graham Farmelo
We’ll move straight on to Stef Steyaert, and then take a block of questions. Stef, I owe an apology to you. I said he was from the Netherlands. In fact he’s from that excellent country Belgium.
Stef Steyaert
Good afternoon, everybody. I want to start with thanking the organization and Graham for inviting me here to share knowledge with you. And I will talk about one specific method, the most popular method in Europe at least, of involving the broader public in science and technology policy, and that is the consensus conference.
What is a consensus conference? A consensus conference is a method where the objective is to provide a way for normal citizens, for lay people, to assess societal aspects of science and technology development, and in that way try to influence policy decisions on science and technology topics. And as Edna said very correctly, the goal is also, of course, to influence policy decisions on other topics, because talking about science and technology is also talking about very broad field of potential influence. The core of a consensus conference is a lay panel of (depending in which country you organize it) 15 to 30 citizens. Other participants in a consensus conference are experts (we call it "reference persons, " because, in my country at least, when you talk of an expert, you mean an academic expert. But a reference person could also from an NGO or whatever). And the general public is also involved, and policy-makers, of course, because they are the targeted people. And the result of a consensus conference is a final report with conclusions and recommendations that is handed over to politicians and stakeholders.
Key steps in a consensus conference. And thank you, Edna, for reminding me that I forgot one very important key step in this overview, which is the step of creating an information brochure for the citizens. So you have the recruitment and selection of citizen panels, you have the making of the information brochure, you have a first study weekend, you have a second study weekend, you have the public conference (third weekend), and then of course you have the dissemination and validation phase.
Let’s start with the beginning. We always work with lay panels of about 16 people in my country. How do you get these people? You start with anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 randomly selected citizens—we always work with 4,000. And you send out an invitation to them, asking them, would you like to participate in a consensus conference, and of course giving them all the information they need to make their decision. And depending on the subject, these positive answers can vary between, let’s say, 50 to sometimes 500-600. You select a lay panel of 14 to 18 lay citizens. (In Switzerland, for instance, they always work with lay panels of 30 people.) And you base that selection on sex, age, and social class. You try to get as many women as men; you try to have more or less an equal distribution on age and social class. And once you’ve made that selection (and that’s a very important thing to do, and I will come back to that in one of my last slides), you look at the people you’ve selected, and you look at the motivation letter they wrote. Why do you do that? Because you want to control the selection you made based on their motivations. Once you see that in your group of, let’s say, 16 citizens, you have for instance 4 to 5 citizens giving exactly the same motivation, then you redo your selection. You change some persons in that lay panel. Why? I will come back to that later on. And once you have made this final selection, you send out a confirmation of participation to these citizens.
Parallel to that process of selecting your lay panel, you also make your information brochure. The way we do that traditionally is that we first make really a typical research project on the topic. So we write a report, a scientific report, and we give that scientific report to a copy writer or a science writer to make it into a very accessible, easy-to-handle information brochure for lay people. And a few weeks prior to the first weekend, the first study weekend, the citizens receive the information brochure.
And then you have the first study weekend. And the first stage in that first weekend, which is normally from Friday evening until Sunday evening, is of course project introduction; and then, after all the introduction is done, the citizens start with the identification of key issues of the topic under consideration. And the way we traditionally do that is by using Post-Its where the citizens can write a lot of things that for them are very important on the topic, and then we cluster them and we name them, etcetera.
Once we have these key issues, we start with the formulation round of questions, and of course very important also in that first weekend are team-building activities, because these people will be working very hard in the next 10 weeks, and it’s very important that the spirit in that team is very good. And you see here an exercise of team building, one of the most popular we have in Belgium. I like to use it a lot. You blindfold the citizens and you hide somewhere a long rope, and then the team has to look for it and they have to make a square, blindfolded. And it’s a very amusing exercise to watch when you’re not blindfolded.
And then we come to the next study weekend. It’s normally 6 weeks after the first study weekend. And what you do there is, you invite your first experts. We never do that during a first weekend. Some countries invite experts in the first weekend. But at my institute we do that in the second. Why? To make citizens acquainted with how to handle an expert. For instance, on this photo you see two experts. One is Bart Nuttin, who is one of the leading brain scientists in Belgium. His specialization is deep brain stimulation for people with obsessive-compulsive behavior. And at his left-hand side is the president of the major patient organization in Flanders. And so they interact with the citizens. They present themselves; they talk about what they are doing; citizens can ask questions. And that’s really a way to familiarize citizens with experts.
And then after that, citizens start, based on the work they already did during the first weekend, they start formulating questions for the reference persons that will come in the final public conference. And a small piece of work that is also done in the second study weekend is the planning of the public conference, because citizens themselves will plan how they will work.
And then you have the public conference itself. First thing that happens there is that the selected reference persons (and normally it’s somewhere between 12 and 16 people) present the answers to the questions that were put forward to them by the citizens. After that has happened, of course, citizens can ask for clarification questions. Then there is a real dialogue between citizens and the reference persons. And once that has happened, the lay panel goes into a separate room and they start to assess all the information, they received from the experts, from the reference persons, and they start writing their final report, which is handed over to policy-makers and stakeholders on the last day of the public conference. And then you go to a whole dissemination and validation phase.
Here you see it happening live at the Flemish Parliament (we work for the parliament). In the morning you see here very clearly, that’s the lay panel. On the opposite side you see the experts. And so experts are simply giving their answers to the questions. Then in the afternoon you have a real dialogue setting, with all the citizens and the experts around a big table, and with the public sitting around them. So you really change the setting to construct a real dialogue between them. And then during the night (and if I say during the night, mostly it is during the night; we have had meetings until 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning) citizens write their report, and the next day it’s handed over to, in this case, the president of our parliament, Norbert De Batselier, who in our case always commits himself and his parliament to work with the results and with the advice of the citizen panel.
When we present the results of consensus conferences and other participatory initiatives in our parliament, one question that the members of parliament always ask us is, How representative are these results? What they mean is: Must we take them into account or not? And it’s very strange for them, because most of the parliamentary work is done in small committees of only 15 people. But it’s an important question, because you always get that question about statistical representativeness of your results. And I always say, What are arguments for participation? And I saw the same slide this morning in another presentation. You have three arguments for participation. You have a very pragmatic argument, which is that if you involve people from the beginning, then they are likely to accept your policy afterwards more easily, so it makes policy more effective. You have simply a moral argument; you have to involve people because that is democracy. And then you have (and this is my favorite) really a content-based argument. Why do you involve people? You involve people because in doing so, you broaden the argumentation base for your policy. And that’s the reason why in the beginning, when we select people, we try to have as varied a group as possible, because it’s very important: the more varied the group is, the more they will come up with new and better arguments. And you will not find these arguments if you simply follow a normal policy cycle. So by involving the public, you bring more and better arguments to policy-makers. And that’s why, in the previous slides, there is something like statistical representation but there is also something like problem representation. And we think that in organizing a consensus conference, we can assure politicians that the results are representative, so they should take those results into account. (One more slide. I’m going to skip this because Edna already said something about that.)
What is the number of consensus conferences in Europe? They were very popular in Denmark until a few years ago. Unfortunately in Denmark, since 2002, I think, there has been a right-wing government that cut down the budget of our Danish colleagues, so the last couple of years there have been fewer consensus conferences in Denmark. But the number is growing in Europe.
The impact of consensus conferences is very hard to measure. And I want to mention here the study we did a few years ago about technology-assessment methods and impacts, where we really studied the impact of participatory events. But for sure, consensus conferences played a very important role in different public debates and policy-making processes (and Edna already said it; I only have to mention it here): GMOs, gene therapy, genetic testing, transportation and mobility, and discussions like that. And consensus conferences do set new topics on policy agendas, so like genetic pre-implantation, cloning, brain sciences, etcetera. I will stop here because I have reached my time limit. Thank you very much.
Audience
I’d like to commend the organizers and all the participants, because it has been really very, very valuable. My question is general, so it’s not really directed at the first two speakers, though I’m sure they can address it. We talk about the general public as if it’s kind of one group of people. But in the United States and certainly in many other countries, it’s a very diverse public. They have different needs; they have different responses. For example, at Rhode Island College, many of the students are first-generation college. And we have had to adjust our teaching style to some of the beliefs they bring to college, to some of the reactions they bring, in terms of even speaking up to authority. And then if you talk about students of color, you talk about a different issue also. So my question is, how do we address this issue of a diverse public, and how do we get them involved, because there are a lot of members of the public that would be very frightened of being part of a consensus conference.
Edna Einsiedel
I think you make a very good point. That’s why I was very careful to use the word "publics " instead of just "public. " And I agree with you. That is a major challenge. For example, three years ago, when Health Canada did its public consultation on the issue of xenotransplantation, one factor or criterion that we always use in our country is regional representation. You have to have consultations in every key region around the country. In addition to that, there was a special consultation that was held in the north, in order to hear from First Nations communities. So that is an ongoing challenge, I think, for these activities.
Stef Steyaert
The question is correct. With consensus conference, for instance, you don’t reach, let’s say, the average public. What you see is most likely the more engaged citizens. And I think that with a method like consensus conference, you won’t succeed in reaching exactly (and that’s the problem of that statistical representation) the different layers of the public. One solution to that is looking for other methods. I have just concluded a project on poor and socially excluded people and the way technology influences their lives. And there we succeeded in reaching a thousand people participating in a project by simply using other methods. We worked with dramatic theater and things like that. So you can create methods where you have a much higher rate of success in trying to involve a much broader public. But methods like consensus conference are very demanding for people to participate in. People have to invest three weekends and a lot of study time and things like that. So people aren’t likely to do that. You have to be engaged to do that, and not everybody is that engaged. But you have to look for other methods.
Audience
My question was a continuation of that. With the consensus conferences, it seems that with issues that are controversial, you don’t really reach consensus. Because you’re going for the problem of representation, right? So you’ll have opposing views. And so the report will also contain opposing views. So can the policy-makers really use the reports with such different recommendations?
Stef Steyaert
With consensus conference, it depends who makes the interpretation of the word "consensus " itself. In our projects, we say that there needs to be a consensus on the questions the citizens, the lay panel, want to ask of the reference persons. That is the consensus part. Afterwards, in their assessment of all the information they gathered, they can have different views. I have to say that it doesn’t happen much that the report expresses different views. In 95 percent of the advice, the lay panel is completely unanimous about their advice. And that’s also the way you do it. The way you do the whole process is a way directed to consensus. I am a very strong believer that if you create the right circumstances for citizens to have a real dialogue, then consensus is more or less evident. But there are cases, like when you do a project on GMOs. I had a citizen in my lay panel who really said, "No, you can’t touch life. Stay out of life. " And she stuck to that viewpoint the whole course of the project. But on the other hand, I have to say that there were citizens on the same lay panel that completely changed their viewpoints after going through the whole dialogue process and information process, etcetera. So in 95 percent of the cases in a consensus conference, the lay panel is completely unanimous about their advice.
Graham Farmelo
That’s amazing. Edna, did you want to comment on that?
Edna Einsiedel
No.
Audience
My name is Jackie Novatt. I’m a graduate student in biology. I have two kind of related questions. The first one is: How receptive are policy-makers to the recommendations of these lay-people consensus conferences? And how receptive is the general public to decisions that policy-makers base on lay-people consensus conferences? Are they more willing to accept them?
Edna Einsiedel
I think that’s a very good question. I would have to say that I have seen a significant change in the attitudes of policy-makers in Canada. When we did our consensus conference in 1999, none of the federal agencies were interested in collaborating with us. In some ways that was good, because it was on the issue of GM foods, very controversial, and the less the feds were involved in this process, the better for us. But I would have to say that in the last 6 or 7 years, there really has been a change in openness and receptiveness to doing more consultations.
Now, the question of impact on policy is more difficult to answer, because of course there are a lot of consultations going on over and beyond just, let’s say, the citizen jury. There are consultations with various stakeholder groups. And one of the first things that is emphasized with the citizen consultation is that it does not necessarily mean that their recommendations are going to be adopted unilaterally. There will be a lot of discussions; there will be other stakeholders heard, and so it is a very important input, but not the only input.
Graham Farmelo
Thank you for that question. Let’s take the next one.
Audience
Hello. My name is Patty Nolan. I’m actually a very small, local-level policy-maker because I serve on the school committee across the river in Cambridge. My question is very much a follow-on of what just happened. To get policy-makers to care, it seems to me that blending the learnings from citizen panels would best be done through extending them into the educational community so that people are asking the same questions of themselves in a variety of settings, particularly through educational institutions. If that could happen, the question is whether that would then spread the word to many more people in the public, to your average citizen, which therefore would then come back around the other way to policy-makers. As more and more citizens got involved and educated on a particular policy issue, maybe it would then rise up in the policy-makers’ list of a gazillion things they already have to focus on, and therefore might have more of an impact than just a report from a citizen panel? So I’d be curious as to your perspective on that.
Stef Steyaert
I had one last slide exactly on the topic you mention. I think that to make methods like consensus conferences and citizen juries and things like that more successful in the future, I think we have to invest seriously in making the outreach in the wake of consensus conferences much broader than it is now. And you can do that, indeed, by collaborating much more with, for instance, educational initiatives, with science museums, with things like that. We see it already now happening a little bit. I told you about the information brochure, and once we have an information brochure, we receive many questions from teachers about whether they can use that information brochure in their lessons. And of course they can. It’s evident. But I think in the future we have to invest much more in these kinds of things, trying to reach much more of an audience than we do now, because you’re completely right.
Edna Einsiedel
I think that’s a very good question. And in the literature, that’s one of the big points of discussion. And that is, How do you measure impact? And I think if you just look at policy impact, which is the first thing that I think of, or many people think of, I think that’s a very limited way of looking at the impact of these participatory approaches. So other people have looked at media impact; other people have looked at impact on educators and so on.
Audience
My name is Nana Naisbitt. I run a science research center. I’ve never heard of this before, and it’s totally right up my alley. And I’m just wondering, Is it happening in the United States? And also, Does the media print the result of these consensus conferences?
Edna Einsiedel
Yes, there have been small-scale, local or regional consensus conferences that have been held. I know of two or three in the U.S. Most of these deliberative experiments have actually been occurring in Europe, and we North Americans have taken the lead from them. But there are also lots of local experiments going on. I mentioned the citizen-jury process, for example. There are lots of these kinds of experiments going on here in the U.S. at the local level.
Stef Steyaert
Just one small remark. To be honest, the basic model of a consensus conference does come from the United States. It was used in the seventies for assessing new methods for therapy and new treatments in the health sector. That model was taken by the Danish Board of Technology in Europe to make what’s now known as the consensus conference, but the origin lies in the United States. But it was expert-based. It was not involving the public. It was expert-based.
Audience
Does the press print the result?
Edna Einsiedel
In our case, when this panel produced the report on GM foods, they did.
Stef Steyaert
In our case they do, but it’s quite interesting. I watched another presentation on using local television in spreading the results of these kinds of things and science communication. And indeed in the last couple of years we’ve involved local television stations a lot more. Because when you can connect the result of these kinds of initiatives to people’s lives, when you can show why it matters to them, then you really have topics for these kinds of media. So we have a lot of success with that.
Graham Farmelo
Could I just offer one comment, Stef? I shared this with you when I spoke to you, but I can’t resist passing it on. I’ve always been struck, like our last audience member there, given the relative sizes of population, why there are so few consensus conferences in the United States. And I raised this at a meeting at The New York Times, and asked for a broad brush: Why is there that disparity? And the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist William Safire shot back to me and said, "In the United States we don’t believe in consensus. " It’s not my comment. I just offer it to you. You might want to debate that, but that’s exactly what he said to me. There was silence afterwards in the room.
Audience
My name is David Pearson. I’m here with students from the graduate program in science communication at Laurentian University in Science North, in Sudbury. My question is that the citizens who participate in the conferences would seem to become very valuable. Do they continue to be involved in the issues, perhaps by the government inviting them to continue to be part of the policy-making process?
Edna Einsiedel
One of our citizens on the GM food panel in 1999 was then appointed to the Canadian Biotechnology Advisory Committee, which is advisory to the government. So she became the citizen rep on that committee. With the citizen jury that we are now doing on plant molecular farming, looking at the third generation of applications, we actually went back to the original panel from 1999, and of the 15, 12 are now looking at this new application.
Graham Farmelo
Could I just ask you to thank Stef and Edna for their presentations? Thank you very much indeed.
We’re now moving into the case studies. And I just want to summarize the kind of issues the projects will be talking about. We’re going to be talking about a new adults-only center for debate and discussion between the public and scientists, part of a museum that’s "x-rated "; new ways of facilitating public involvement in nanotechnology, something that we hear a lot about; the phenomenon of science cafés, which in some sense is a rediscovery of the phenomenon of coffeehouses in the major cities of Europe, where Newtonian ideas were shared across cups of bad coffee (this is before Starbucks, incidentally). It’s a phenomenon in North America, and we’ll be hearing a lot about it. And then, finally, the biggest consensus conference, as far as I know, ever seen on a cutting-edge topic, classic example of the upstream engagement that Edna was talking about. The topic there is brain science. Now, some people say, "What on earth has that got to do with people in the street? " Well, brain science is absolutely everywhere. First newspaper I opened when I got to the States on Thursday was The Wall Street Journal, and there was a huge article on brain science in the Marketplace section. It is everywhere. So we’ll be hearing a lot about that, and what the public are saying about the implications of that, later on.
So there are four speakers. Very briefly, Heather Mayfield, who’s deputy head of the Science Museum in London, will be speaking first, followed by Doug Sarno of The Perspectives Group, based in Virginia (they do a lot of great work on public consultation); Emmanuelle Schuler from the University of Houston on science cafés; and then, finally, Gerrit Rauws, chief executive of the King Baudouin Foundation, based in Brussels. Let’s begin by welcoming Heather Mayfield.
Heather Mayfield
The public. Well, they’re a funny bunch, aren’t they? They’re not like you and me, you know. Well, in terms of the projects that I’m looking at, I would suggest they’re not like us. And I’ve been hearing an awful lot of talk today about projects that really are about people like us. But I would suggest that probably everybody in this room has a privileged knowledge, understanding, and existence with science. You’re either a scientist yourself, you work with scientists, or you’re in a position like I am. I’m really lucky. I work at the Science Museum in London, so I work for an organization that scientists are very affectionate about. So I’m in the position where I can pick up the telephone and quite literally, I’ve never had a scientist who doesn’t want to talk to me, because, hey, they came to the Science Museum when they were little. So for all of us, we’re in a position that most of the population has never been in, and to be quite honest, will never be in.
So when I was first asked to pick three projects in Europe where people were participating and talking with scientists, I decided to choose three where entertainment was high on the agenda, where people would want to take part because, hey, they were going to come and have a great night out. And I also wanted to take projects which, at their heart, were prepared to be experimental, and where they did things which might—and indeed sometimes do—fail. They might do something that just doesn’t work, and stand up and hold their hands up and say, "Actually, we tried that. Complete and utter failure. " And I also wanted to look at things which took science as a cultural activity, which didn’t stick it out on the sidelines somewhere, but actually said, "It’s part of what we do all the time, what we do every day, and actually it’s an important part of how I live my life. " And so you won’t be surprised to learn that obviously I did choose the Dana Centre in London, kindly called by Graham x-rated. I’ll be onto that in a minute. But I also looked at two European-wide projects, the Decide Project and the Nano Dialogue Project.
So what is the Dana Centre? The Dana Centre is the Science Museum’s adult-only venue. And we mean adult-only venue, and we’ve carefully prepared that. It’s a bar. You can’t come in unless you’re over 18. We program three nights a week, 40 weeks of the year. And that came out of our naiveté. We had no idea what the reality of three nights a week, 40 weeks of the year, was going to be. If we were doing it again, we wouldn’t be doing as much programming as we currently are.
The Dana Centre is very firmly about a non-specialist audience. It’s a bar. This particular slide is showing brain science for beginners. And this is brain surgeons and neuroscientists working with visitors. And people are doing brain science on melons, and they’re talking to the scientists about the research they’re doing. A really important part of the Dana Centre is cutting out the middle man. It’s really not interesting to anybody what I think about brain surgery and neuroscience. Why would anybody be interested in what I’ve got to say as a science communicator? I’m interested in getting really good communicators who are practitioners, talking with the public.
We think it’s really important, this over-18 thing at the Science Museum, because it allows us to tackle topics that we just can’t do in a museum which is really firmly embedded in people’s brains as a place for families and children. And the Dana Centre grew out of a piece of research where we asked young adults what we could do in the Science Museum that would attract them. And as we’re a museum, we were rather hoping they’d want a history-of-science gallery. And actually they came back and said, "We really like Launch Pad, " which is our children’s hands-on gallery. "What we’d really like is a Launch Pad without any children in it. " And so that’s how we came down to doing something adults-only, in a separate building.
When people say to me, "What do you do in this Dana Centre, " quite honestly, pretty much anything that will engage people with science. And the audience, everything is very firmly targeted at ages between 18 and 40. That’s not to say that we obviously exclude people over the age of 40, which is a good job because I’ve never fitted into that category since the place has been open. But actually the programming that happens there is very firmly focused on that younger age group, and that’s partly because we were not experiencing them being engaged with science at all.
We have to work nationally and internationally. I took this as a screen grab. This is a piece of work from the Liberty Science Center, where they take live brain surgery. We piggyback on that program. Live brain surgery happens in our café, which is a slightly odd feeling. It’s hugely popular. We’ve been running this program in conjunction with them for three years. The cutting out of people in the middle and actually getting people to talk directly to the surgeons has been hugely popular.
And I think it’s real important that you don’t do programming for people like yourself. This is our resident comedy club center, Punk Science. They have their own television series now. They’re sellouts at the Edinburgh Festival. I have never yet sat through one of their performances, because, hey, it isn’t for people like me. But after 15 years working purely in contemporary science and science communication, I’m pretty certain that these four nutters have done an awful lot more for the communication of science than I’ve done through a whole series of exhibitions and programs.
And we will take other people’s techniques and use them. This is a couple voting. So we look at what’s happening in reality television and other popular forms of media for this age, and we unashamedly rip them off. Yes, we’re popular and populist. And actually we’re quite proud of it, and we don’t think it’s dumbing down one iota.
I chose the Decide Project because I think it really is an example, and a good example, of deliberative democracy. It reaches a wide range of audiences, and it provides a depth of understanding. So what is the Decide Project? The Decide Project is a European-wide collaboration where issues in contemporary biomedicine are tackled through a board game. And it actually requires quite a degree of concentration by people overnight in a two-hour session, to learn about the various topics and come to a democratic, deliberative conclusion.
This is largely aimed at young adults. This is an example in a science center in Europe, but also some people have been running it in their homes. And I was interested in the idea of drawing a friend that came out this morning, because I think this is really an example of doing that. And for all the people who play the Decide game, you can upload your results and see what’s happening elsewhere in Europe. You’re part of a very, very big and broad-ranging series of findings. So you really feel that you’ve taken part in something which actually has impact.
Nano Dialogue is an enormous project. I can’t imagine anyone else has ever done anything like this. This is an exhibition, the same exhibition opening on the same day in eight different countries, and it’s accompanied by a culturally appropriate series of events. So everywhere that this project went, the individual centers built up their own dialogue events. They brought in their own scientists and they did things that were appropriate to their own audiences. And for me, it’s a real integration of museology, scientists, and the public. And so it was one of the ones I was particularly interested in.
This was the exhibition. Now, I haven’t really got much to say about this, because actually it was pretty much as you see it. And I don’t think as a communication tool it did work very effectively. However, for many of the places that it was going, it was the first time they’d looked at any form of contemporary science. So although it wasn’t the best exhibition in the world, it certainly had a big impact on audiences, and they were enthusiastic about it. People are hungry for information about nanotechnology.
What was great about the exhibition was, it really allowed contact to take place within the exhibition. And this actually is a slide from the Deutsches Museum in Germany. This completely changed how visitors acted and reacted in the Deutsches Museum. And when I talked to Elizabeth, who ran the project there, about what had happened, she said to me, "It was amazing. German people talking to each other! " And I really, really knew what she meant.
I think the other great thing about this was, people were really experimental with the programming. So this is looking at what happens at a nano level through the medium of dance. Why not? It’s an interesting and challenging way of doing it. I chose this site because it’s so cross-generational. This is actually our engineers talking to people about the work that they do in nanotechnology. And it really was an all-ages discussion. I think that was a really fantastic thing about this project. It had an enormous scope.
So there were actually some common threads of what made successful projects. And actually, to my great delight, one of the threads was that they were experimental. They were prepared to try new and brave things. And they created something that was adaptable, that could be used differently by different audiences without devaluing their experience.
It was really important that you got institutional understanding and support for the projects. It’s really, really difficult to do this kind of work if you’re not going to be supported by an equally brave institution. And you, as individuals dealing with these kinds of projects, and others who deal with them, have to be able to deal with issues of control. I can’t imagine what it was like for eight museums in Europe to all take the same exhibition that they hadn’t personally authored and deal with that on the floor. I certainly would have found that very difficult, and I was full of admiration for them that they made it work.
All of these projects have measurable criteria for success. People are really, really looking properly at what’s working, and being very good and open both about what’s working and what is not. And it has to be said, this is expensive stuff. These people had realistic budgets which allowed them to complete the projects properly and effectively.
What really were the success criteria that worked? Looking at audiences—new, varied, but targeted audiences—was a common theme of all of the projects. And the people who came were engaged and enthusiastic. And this does hit one of the problems of all of these projects: you are preaching to the converted, largely. It also gave scientists a completely different way of reacting with the public. This is one thing where you will never see a lecture or a panel discussion. So it really gives scientists an opportunity to interact in a much more informal and generally much less combative way with the public. And practitioners and policy-makers get people who are really informed participants who are really engaged with topics.
But there are massive issues with all of these things. All the projects are tiny. The Dana Centre has 10,000 people a year, and at capacity can only get 15,000. And even when you look at what’s happening online, it’s actually only really small amounts of people having this very, very high quality experience. And the reality is, because of that, these projects are very expensive. There are large operational costs for small audiences, and it’s very hard to do this kind of project without having a really committed staff, and it’s quite relentless to be turning around this kind of programming. And I think you have to ask the question: What is the real impact of these high-profile but very small projects?
So, finally, where are we going now? Well, we need to move from the experimental to the mainstream. We need to be able to increase what we do, and do it more effectively and in different ways. And we need to move so the projects that we’re dealing with really do impact on policy. And there’s the whole question: As you’ve built up these audiences of people who become knowledgeable and interested and engaged, let’s not lose them. Let’s not do that stun-and-run. But I don’t have an answer for how you keep them coming back. The reality is that to work and to deliver the larger audiences, we need to work much more innovatively with mass media in order to be able to actually get this kind of information out more effectively. I couldn’t have done this without these three particular people, so to Elizabeth, Andrea, and the Dana Centre programs team, thank you.
Douglas Sarno
Good evening. My name is Doug Sarno. And it is evening, so first let me congratulate your stamina, because it’s been a long day. I want to talk a little bit about public participation as it’s done on the ground, as it’s done in the field, as it’s done with a project, probably at a little smaller scale than some of the other folks here have talked about, but with perhaps more immediacy as to what we’re trying to achieve.
Before I do that, though, let me tell you just a little bit about myself, because it bears on what I do and where I am and what I’m going to talk about. I started my professional life as an engineer, a young engineer in a brand new field of cleaning up hazardous waste sites in the early 1980’s. And we found ourselves quickly making lots and lots and lots of decisions that were perfectly technically sound and perfectly socially infeasible. And this happened over and over again, and these decisions could not get implemented. And as a young person, I sat there and I scratched my head and I thought, What is going on? And my older engineering brethren would say, "Well, it’s just a people problem. " I said, "Hmm, there’s got to be more to it than that. "
Ultimately, I found that it was a people problem, but the problem wasn’t the public, it was us. It was the engineers. It was the scientists. It was the decision-makers, who really didn’t have a clue how to make decisions in complex, diverse human situations. And we had to get better at that. And so over the course of a decade, really, I transformed my career from a highly technical career to really one of a process career. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the better part of the last two decades now, to the point where in the mid-nineties, I actually served as executive director for the International Association of Public Participation, when I was one of the very few engineers who was even in that organization at the time. That’s changing, which is good.
So let me talk a little bit about where I’m coming from and what I want to talk about. What I’m going to do is just cover some real basic principles of public participation. The folks who spoke ahead of me here and in other sessions have done a really good job laying out some of these important elements, and I’m not going to talk about many of them. The hardest part in any one of these 15-minute speeches is what to leave out, and I’ve left a lot out. But I want to cover some real quick points, and then I want to talk about, in particular, one group of projects that we’re doing at a particular facility, a national laboratory outside of Chicago.
First, let me say, from my point of view, what is public participation. It’s any process that seeks to understand public values and use input from diverse publics in a planned effort to improve decision making. Now, that’s a mouthful. There’s a lot of stuff there. But a couple things I just want to point out.
We’re not involving the public in deciding how to do submarine research. We’re involving public values in deciding how to make decisions about science. And we’re going to talk about that a little bit further. But we have to get to the values level of things. We have to get to the core things. We have to understand what’s important. We can’t sit here and argue positions, or we’ll get nowhere. And we have to use the input we get to actually inform our decision making. Public participation is about making better decisions, and you will make better decisions if you do good participation. And I think Stef pointed that out very well when he talked about that earlier.
The bottom line here is that public participation is genuine, it has to provide for a genuine opportunity for the public to actually influence the decision. Their input has to matter. This is very different than many, many, many so-called "public-participation programs " that are out there, which are "buy-in programs. " In other words, "I’m engaging the public because I want them to come to the same conclusion I have already arrived at. And if I just give them enough information, if I just work hard enough, and I just convince them enough, they’re going to see how brilliant I really am, and they’re going to come to my point of view. " Not going to happen. We’ve got to get away from that model. It does not work.
Quick cautionary tale. How many people remember the SSC [Superconducting Super Collider]? Well, before the SSC was one of the most expensive holes in the ground outside of Dallas, Texas, it was actually an exciting project that many, many places wanted to have built by them. And the lab I’m going to talk about in a moment, Fermilab outside of Chicago, was one of those. In fact, they were an early favorite, perhaps, to host the SSC. But, ultimately, public opposition to hosting the SSC, to building the SSC at Fermilab, doomed it there. Ultimately, the lack of public support doomed the project completely. We all know the story. It’s another story, not one I’m going to tell now, but it really was a public-participation failure, it really was a public-engagement failure, as much as it was a funding failure.
Quick quote from somebody who opposed the SSC at Fermilab. "I didn’t know what the SSC was, but a friend and neighbor telephoned me to ask if I knew about ‘this SSC thing.’ And did I know it was supposed to go under my house? I started making phone calls locally, and couldn’t get answers to my questions, so I called the governor’s office in Springfield. There they were indignant that I would have the gall to question their decision. "
The project didn’t go forward, because this was the sort of thing that was going on. And the result was this. You can’t read all this, but the bottom line, that sketch there, the giant, tentacled creature there, is actually a depiction of the main building on Fermilab, going out and grabbing up all the local communities and making things terrible for the locals. This was the imagery that was created by the anti-SSC folks at that time. "Fermilab used to be a good neighbor. What a shame. What a disgrace. What a disappointment. This is what it looks like now. " The director of public affairs, who I worked with very closely at Fermilab, has this on her wall, as a constant reminder of what happens when you don’t engage the public effectively. We don’t do that anymore, and I’m going to tell you what we do now.
If we’re going to make science decisions, if we’re going to make good science decisions (and by "good " science decisions, I mean science decisions that actually can be implemented and sustained), they have to engage the public, and we have to get the ownership of the public in those decisions, not just manipulate them and convince them that it’s the right decision.
Many scientists are afraid to let the public into science decisions. They think they’re going to come in and screw around with the science. That’s not what this is about. Of course that’s not what this is about. This is about science policy and science application. And if we think that science policy and science-application decisions are made by pure science, I don’t know where we’ve been living. Of course they’re not. Of course they’re not. But if we want science policy and science-applications decisions to be done well, then the public and others involved in this decision-making have to understand the science. The goal here isn’t to convince people. The goal here is to let people make up their own minds by having good information and good learning about this.
And there are three keys to this. To build this understanding requires three things, three key activities. First, shared learning. Not convincing. Learning together. And learning that we also have a lot to learn as scientists and engineers and technical people, from the public. They have a lot to offer to these decisions. The second is relationship building. We must be in a relationship with the public, not just trying to convince them. And the third is dialogue. This has to be done by talking to each other. This has to be done by engaging with each other. We’ve heard a lot in these last couple days about the Internet revolution and how much more connected we are and have the chance to be. But in some ways, we are less connected than ever, because all these connections are impersonal. And if public participation and if good decision-making are going to work, we have to start to talk to each other. We have to start to dialogue with each other. We have to engage. We have to learn from each other, we have to learn about each other, and we have to build relationships with each other. That’s what public participation is built on.
This is Fermilab. I’m not going to say too much about it. It’s been a national lab since about the late sixties. It’s still the home of the world’s highest energy-particle accelerator. It will hold that distinction for a short period, till the Large Hadron Collider comes on board at CERN (Centre European pour la Recherche Nucleaire). Fermilab would like to get that distinction back by building the next generation of colliders, which is the International Linear Collider. How many people have heard of the ILC? About a dozen. How many people have heard of the feud between Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump? That’s sad.
So knowing that this was coming down the pike several years ago—maybe not the ILC, but that we were going to lose our distinction as the highest energy accelerator and we were going to be needing to build some new projects or some new big project—we knew we had to do a much better job working with the public than we had in the past. We did not want to repeat the SSC situation.
So my firm was hired by Fermilab to come in and help them figure out how to do this. How do we engage the public better? And what we said we needed to do was, let’s ask the public how they want to work with us in the future. And that’s what we did. We built an advisory board. We had 18 diverse stakeholders. Whoever said, "There is no public " is exactly right. There are many publics. It’s not a monolith. We have to stop acting like it is. That’s the "buy-in " scenario that we have to get away from.
For 12 months, they met monthly. They learned all about Fermilab. And they came to very, very detailed recommendations. They basically wrote us a book, after 12 months. And these recommendations were not only a little lengthy, they were really good, and they were really substantial. And they have helped shape how the laboratory is doing its business.
Just a few quick shots. This was a very hands-on, very engaged, very dialogue-based, very learning-based kind of activity. We took them on tours. They talked and talked until they understood everything and they knew where they wanted to go. Then they wrote us this final report. And I want to just pick out a few things from that final report, because what they said is so right spot-on to anybody who wants to do public participation.
Part of what they said was: Here are the principles for public participation. If you want to do public participation right, here’s what you need to do. (1) Build and maintain open and honest relationships. (2) Make sure all views are welcomed, documented, and publicly disseminated. (3) Make sure that stakeholders help to define the issues and the decisions that they should be involved in. (4) Provide for input to public participation processes and strategies. How are we going to implement this stuff? Provide access to up-to-date and user-friendly information. (5) Make sure that input is actively and continually sought during planning and decision-making. (6) Start early, go all the way through. (7) Provide input opportunities for all interested stakeholders. (8) Provide input early in the planning process. (9) Provide information about the decision process, regulatory and technical limitations, and opportunities for input. We sometimes get so wrapped up in just telling them about the technical things that we don’t actually tell them how the decision is going to work, or how this process is going to work, and so never know what’s coming down the pike next. And they said, "Let us in on the planning process itself. " (10) Seek consensus that maximizes value to all stakeholder communities. It’s a pretty high bar, but it’s one that we are now moving forward at Fermilab. Here’s how we’re doing it. And finally (11) provide timely feedback on the results. And in particular, let the public know how they helped to shape the decision. How did their input help? How were they listened to? What difference did it make?
(Slide shown) Same voice. The gentleman whose quote I gave you earlier was on that advisory board. This is what he said at the end of the advisory board. "In working with the Fermilab Community Task Force on Public Participation, I found myself to be completely wrong on three counts. First, with my background from the SSC days, I thought I’d be regarded as the skunk at the garden party. Second, when I spoke my mind, I thought no one was listening. And third, my frustration with the committee process led me to think that we could not provide a readable, effective document. But as I readily admit, I was wrong, wrong, and wrong again. It’s nothing at all like those old SSC days. " Same laboratory, same stakeholders, same science, different process, different results. We didn’t change anything except our attitude. And we completely changed how we interact with the public at this place.
So we’re doing three things right now, because we know, as the ILC is coming down the pike, this is a big deal. The ILC is 30-kilometers long (still don’t quite know exactly, but likely to be 30 kilometers), about 115 meters underground, and it’s linear. It’s one long line. It’s a long tunnel, and we’ll shoot electrons at each other, obviously at very, very high speeds. So this is weird and this is scary and this is right under our houses. Deep under, but under. Whereas when the SSC was there, the neighborhoods in the area surrounding Fermilab were scared to death and basically drove it away, now there’s a lot of understanding and acceptance, and a lot of desire to be part of this decision-making process.
And so we’re doing three things. First, we have something called Fermilab envoys. Second, we have a new task force that is looking at the ILC, and we still have this community task force that helped us with our public-participation activities, because they don’t want to go away. And I’ll explain each of them very quickly.
The envoy program is all relationships. What we’re trying to do is make sure that there is no one out there in the community that says, "I don’t know who these guys are, or what’s going on. " And so we went out and we picked, to start, about 60 or so key members of the community from all different walks of life, and said, "These are people we need to have relationships with. " And we assigned, from the laboratory, 25 scientists and some other types of employees to basically partner with them: give them a call, engage them, they take them to lunch, talk to them, they give them their phone number and email address [I think this is what he means—confusing, since subject switches]. This is their connection to the laboratory whenever they have a question. And whenever the laboratory has some info that it needs to get out, this is one of the ways we do it, by personal contact through personal relationships. We launched this last fall. It has been remarkably successful. Really, we’re seeing results from this all the time. People talk about Fermilab much more. People are much more aware and involved in what’s going on at Fermilab.
And one of the manifestations of this was, we are in the process of launching a new task force. We’re early in the stages of thinking about and designing for an ILC, but we want to make sure that public concerns and issues are part of the whole thinking process. And so we’re getting the public involved very, very early. And we’re doing this through an advisory board that actually is going to have its first meeting a week from today. And we were looking for a 15- to 18-person advisory board like we did before, and we thought, Well, this will be interesting to see how many people we can get interested, and how many people might be interested. We thought we’d get 20-25 applications. We used our envoy program and other means of communication that we’ve been building over the last year, and we got almost 100 applications to serve on this board, from all walks of life, from an eighth grader to several retired people. And it was really exciting. It was really interesting. The hardest part was figuring out how to pick a workable number. And we didn’t do such a good job, because it went all the way up to 28 when we finally picked them. But there were just so many interesting and diverse viewpoints that we felt it was just so important to do that. So it was more important to get that right group than to say no to anybody. And we know we turned away lots of wonderful people.
So they’re coming together; they’re going to meet next week. We’re going to meet with them for about a year, and this is right at the beginning of the planning process for the ILC. Nothing has been decided. Absolutely nothing. So they’re going to be on the ground floor, helping Fermilab to talk about (if it’s built at Fermilab), how would it get built, what would it look like, how would we mitigate any kinds of issues with the community, what’s important to the community, how to make all that work.
And finally, the community task force, as I said, doesn’t want to go away. So they continue to meet as needed, and they actually have met with us several times to help design this new task force. So we have this very dynamic and ongoing relationship with the community to help us figure out the right ways to work with the community. So we’re looking forward to the next year, and how we’re going to be able to engage people directly in the building, or the designing of the building, of this huge linear collider. I will stop there, and have questions later.
Emmanuelle Schuler
Good evening. My name is Emmanuelle Schuler. I am the founder of the Science Café, and I’m delighted to have the opportunity tonight to share with you my passion. This is what I do on the side of my work and taking care of my young family. This has been a passion of mine for six years, and I’m delighted to have the chance to share it with such a broad and distinguished audience.
The Science Café is the only cultural event in town in Houston, Texas, that gathers experts and the public to debate scientific issues that affect our lives and our society. So with a panel of experts, we openly discuss things like cloning, global health, Internet privacy, electronic voting, and urban pollution. And by doing so, we wish to empower the public in making informed decisions on scientific topics that are on the top of the political agenda, such as stem cells, intelligent design, hurricane preparedness, Medicare reform, etcetera. We are a not-for-profit organization, and we have been developing close ties with communities over the last three years. And this picture summarizes what the Science Café touches upon. It touches upon awareness, education, but most of all it’s about civic engagement. And my argument tonight is that the Science Café is about civic engagement, and I will tell you why.
Here is a typical Science Café. Science Café is a public discussion. It’s not a lecture. We meet once a month in a coffee shop, and we start at 7:30 in the evening. Each panelist (typically there are 3 to 4) has 10 minutes to share his or her point of view on the topic. And it can be quite provocative, the idea being that the panelist gives some food for thought to the audience. And then right after this 30 or 40 minutes, we open the floor to questions. The moderator ensures good communication between the audience and the panelists. But I want to emphasize that there is no pre-set agenda. There’s only one topic we know we’re going to discuss—for example, global health. And the evening or the agenda is set by the audience, asking questions to the panelists. The scientist is there to serve the public. S/he’s not there to lecture the public.
So again, the value of doing these events is that we do it regularly on a monthly basis, and this way we create a platform for a sustained dialogue between experts and the public on topics that affect our lives and society.
The Science Cafés, in my perspective, are cultural events. And how do we make it a cultural event? We do so by having a panel of experts, where we always have a scientist. But we always challenge the science with two or three other experts who are not scientists but who do share a common interest in the topic. For example, we have discussed cloning with ethicists and writers, who were there to bring a different perspective than just scientific fact to the discussion. We have hosted ethicists, writers, journalists, public servants, persons from NGOs, foundations, companies.
What Science Cafés are not: They are not a window-dressing for science. We are not an advocate for science. But what we do is to try to create a platform where we discuss science in a broader context than just for the sake of discussing science.
So who participates in the Science Café? Panelists are opinion leaders from the local community. And of course there’s always one scientist, the other ones being artists, writers, politicians, journalists, congressmen, congresswomen. And they come from very diverse entities: academic institutions typically, but also foundation NGOs, as I mentioned previously.
Who is the public? Well, over the three years we have been holding the Science Café in Houston. And what we find is that the ages range from the early twenties up to 70-80 years old. They are typically educated, meaning they typically have an undergraduate degree. It doesn’t mean they are necessarily aware of the topic we are discussing that night, but they are typically educated. They are local, curious, and engaged. They are thrilled to have the chance to be sitting very close to experts. It’s an intimate discussion. We are about 60 in the coffee shop, sitting around these panelists, so they are thrilled to have a chance to ask their questions to the panelists. It’s a very interesting way of engaging the public into the scientific arena.
What is discussed? Well, we choose the topic on the basis that it has to be a timely issue, something that has been discussed locally in the newspapers or in the news. And we’ve discussed things like doping in sports, forensic science, the smell of love, cloning ethics, nanotechnology, etcetera. We try to cover a broad spectrum of scientific issues.
So now behind the scenes. Though it sounds like a pretty straightforward event to put together, there are many actors behind the scenes. First is a coffee shop. This is a nice, cozy place that is located in the cultural part of town, in Houston, that can hold about 60 persons. Then we have partners. We have quite a few partners. Houston PBS particularly is very interested in that type of event, and the moderator of our discussions is a journalist from Houston PBS, so the public knows her. Some of the public, I believe, come because they want to see who she is and they want to interact with her. WGBH and Sigma Xi, the research society, have been great resources for promoting Science Cafés across the country, and I will talk later about this.
So what do we do to tell people about what happens? We have a Web site that we use to keep in touch with our audience. We also have flyers, and we write press releases to the local media. Hopefully it gets published in the local newspapers.
We have sponsors. The sponsors – executives from various Institutes at Rice University - came to me. They said, "This is a great idea. We want to give you money to make this happen. " So they became sponsors, and they actually give us money to run this. And what do we use this money for? We use it for different things. One is to invite the panelists for dinner prior to the Science Café. As I said, we challenge science with non-scientists, so they like to meet and have a chance to kind of break the ice and get acquainted with each other. And we have a sound technician, because we do have a sound system in the room so that everybody can hear, so we have a sound technician that runs the sound system. We have a designer who takes care of the Web site. We need to print flyers and posters, so that costs money. So these are the things we do. So the sponsors ensure cash flow for us, which is about $4,000 to $5,000 a year. And the partners are those who contribute to the Science Café in the form of in-kind contributions, by supporting the promotion of the events. Actually, Houston PBS runs an ad on public TV every month to announce events. And we don’t pay anything for it. They just think it’s great to do, and they do it.
Now, I do believe that in some way, though I don’t have a measure for it, the Science Cafés across the nation and internationally bridge the gap between science and society. How do they achieve that? First, by taking science back where it belongs: to the cultural sphere. So the public re-appropriates or revisits science from a very different perspective. By bringing experts and the public on an equal footing, there’s an education process that is taking place where both the public and the scientists are learning from each other about their respective expectations. And we think to some extent that these Science Cafés empower the public in making informed decisions.
So what is the impact of Science Cafés? It’s hard to tell, but the truth of the matter is that they have been discussed in the media. The New York Times has discussed it, the Sacramento Bee, and also magazines such as Nature and Science, which have early on made Science Cafés public by writing about them. And even fashion magazines like Vogue. They also have been highlighted in the international press, such as Japan Times and Le Monde in France.
Now, what I find very interesting is that a lot of people are increasingly paying attention to Science Cafés. Why is that? I believe, because it started as a grassroots movement about ten years ago in the UK, under the name Café Scientifique, and it has spread out to the extent that today there are about 200 Science Cafés worldwide. There are about 40 of them in the U.S., and every week I hear of a new venture. There are about 70 in Europe, there are about 15 in Southeast Asia, and there are about a hundred of them that are targeted to high school students, called Café Scientifique Junior.
What I find very interesting is that there are no two Science Cafés that are alike. They are all independent ventures, and so they come under very different names. Science Café is one of them. And when I talk about Science Cafés, I include the diversity of Science Cafés, such as Café Scientifique, SciTalk, Café Sci. I just randomly picked up some but I’m sure there are more than that.
So their formats are different. In our case we have a multi-disciplinary expert panel, but some are like a one-man or one-woman show, like a performance. Some are held in pubs, others are held in museums, and even outdoors. So there are many different ways of running a Science Café. There is no one format.
What I think Science Cafés achieve is a spontaneous and genuine exchange between the public and scientists. So again, there’s no one unique mission, and there is no money to make. It’s all on a volunteer basis. And yet it’s a growing movement. So I find it very intriguing. And it led me to try to understand what unifies them all. There’s something there. It’s a growing movement, and there’s more and more interest. And so to me, I believe that the unifying theme of Science Cafés is that in spite of their great diversity, they achieve something very important; they expose the public to some form of civic engagement. We believe that by having a sustained dialogue every month, we encourage the public somewhat in taking one of the following actions: either becoming better informed—by asking their own questions to the experts, they are getting familiarized with this process, so they’re not intimidated to contact other experts. They may contact their officials, congress members, or members of the city council, or participate in other forms of public meetings. We talked about consensus conferences. They may be more comfortable in this kind of setting after they come to a few Science Cafés. They may want to do some community work, or encourage others to participate in such public meetings or scientific meetings.
So to conclude, why do we care about civic engagement? We care because I think it has an important role in the broader scientific enterprise. Because it helps people join in a common discussion for the promotion of everyone’s well-being. And it helps build a sense of scientific citizenry among the public at large. Thank you.
Gerrit Rauws
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Let me thank the organizers of the conference for inviting me here to present the Meeting of Minds project, the European citizens’ deliberation on brain science. Let me also congratulate you for still being here after such a long day.
This picture is not the result of a very long brainstorming session between creative people. It’s just one of the pictures I found between the many hundreds that some photographers have taken during this project. But it represents really well what this project is about. What the headphone stands for will become clear in a second. The little brain in the middle, in fact, is a stress ball. And I first saw it as a gadget from the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The difference is that their version was gray. And gray is the color of a brain that has been submitted to too much stress. It is the color of a brain in a dead body. So we thought we could do better, and this is the color of a brain in a living body.
Imagine Luigi. Luigi is a 62-year-old wine farmer living on the Italian island of Sicily. And on a beautiful day in spring 2005, he finds in his letter box an invitation to spend more than 12 days in Naples and in Brussels discussing brain research. He probably first thinks it’s either a joke or a mistake, or, why not, a commercial from his prime minister, Berlusconi. But when he finds out that it’s neither one of these three, he probably asks himself: Why me? And why brain science?
Well, our brains are essentially who we are. And if new technologies and drugs can alter, enhance, or control our brains, then they will change or they might change what it means to be human. So brain research is something very fundamental. And yes, brain research today is in a very rapid evolution. And yet a public debate about its broad social and ethical and moral implications is still very limited, especially in Europe.
So the project Meeting of Minds, the European citizens’ deliberation on brain science, aims to rectify this lack of public debate in Europe, and to do this in a European context—in a multilingual, multicultural context—as part of the promotion of the European research area promoted by the European Commission.
It was a very challenging task. First, there is no experience at all with multilingual public-deliberation experiments. At that time, 2002, there was a very limited number of public-engagement initiatives on brain research, and there was limited experience in Europe with working with a larger group. So it took us almost three years to find the necessary funding, to get the support of the research community, and to get the method right. It became a two-year pilot project, led by the King Baudouin Foundation, and a consortium of 12 partner organizations from nine countries. Among these organizations (and it was a very interesting partnership) were science centers and science museums (such as the Dana Centre of the Science Museum in London), parliamentary technology-assessment institutes (such as the Flemish Parliamentary Institute), universities and their brain-research departments, and public foundations such my organization. The budget was brought together by the European Commission from a grant from the Science and Society program and by my own organization, and exceeded, all in all, $3 million.
In the center of the project was a panel of 126 randomly selected citizens, as Stef Steyaert explained, representing all walks of life and the diversity of the population. The participating countries: Denmark, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Greece—citizens speaking eight different languages.
What were the objectives? Well, first to allow citizens to make an assessment of the societal and the ethical aspects of brain sciences, taking into account recent advances in this research area. But also to set the issue of brain sciences on the wider political agenda, and to come up with recommendations to the political, science, and research communities at the European level and at the national level, on societal issues related to brain science. It’s not only a European project; it’s ten projects for one. The project has its specific deliverables and its specific outcomes in each of the participating countries. And there was also a meta-objective: to set a standard for transnational public deliberations in other policy areas.
Here you see the different phases of the project. I will present them in detail. Some of these project steps have already been discussed by Stef because some elements of the citizens’ conferences were included. I’ll just draw your attention to what we call the European Citizens’ Conventions, the first of which took place in June 2005, where the citizens for the first time came together and "framed the issue. " They set a common agenda for national deliberations and national assessments that would take place afterwards in their respective countries. And point 5, the second European Citizens’ Convention, just one year ago (almost to the day), was where citizens developed a real European deliberation—much more than a synthesis, an additional layer of reflection—integrating results and opinions coming from different countries. That was very interesting because you saw that citizens developed a sort of intuitive sense of where the European institutions and where the Europe Union could make a difference, compared to their national governments.
I will also say a word on the policy advice and dissemination process, which is very important. The project has been evaluated extensively, and all the evaluation reports, you find on the Web site.
This is a rather classical picture: the German panel in Dresden. This is how it looked in Brussels, where the 126 citizens gathered all together. The method? In a certain way, a new method based on best practices both from Europe and the U.S., largely inspired by consensus conferences, but also using some elements of the 21st century town hall meetings that were developed here in the States, the World Café, Fishbowls, etcetera.
From a logistical point of view, it was a serious challenge. An enormous support staff, including 48 interpreters, people using voting pads to prioritize some of the topics, a wireless laptop network to ensure that all the results of table deliberations and table discussions were captured, and a rather sophisticated interpretation system which we really were piloting, using both simultaneous and consecutive interpretation.
Here you can see somewhat better how it looked like: the interpretation booths, the voting pads, the headphones for the simultaneous translation, and the portable computers.
What were the outcomes? As I said, individual national-assessment reports for all participating countries. And then, after a pressured 72-hour discussion in Brussels, a European report written overnight with 37 recommendations for European policy-makers that was presented the day after in the European Parliament to policy-makers and researchers.
These 37 recommendations relate to seven policy areas, or seven policy dimensions. You see them listed here: the ethics for science and technology, research policy, governance of science and technology, pharmaceutical and medical-devices policy, health care, education and training, and communication policy. Just some examples. I will not run through the 37. For instance, ban the use of brain scans by police, courts, and security services. Or (citizens were really impressed by the notion of brain plasticity) constantly adapt the education system to new knowledge of the brain. Or ensure the right of Europeans not to know they will develop a brain disease later in life. And a last example: Revise patent lengths to increase incentives for pharmaceutical research into rare brain disorders.
An important challenge with important resources. And probably during the process my brain looked more gray than pink from time to time. So the question one should ask is, Did we succeed? Let’s try to link it back to the different objectives we have.
Firstly: Did the citizens make a good assessment of the societal aspects of brain science? In the beginning, many researchers and stakeholders that were invited all along the process were very skeptical. When they first saw the topics the citizens came up with, this skepticism even increased. But by the end of the process, after all those deliberations, when the citizens came with their balanced and very interesting recommendations, I think that many, many scientists (and we have been presenting this to many scientific audiences and ethicists) agree that the citizens pointed out the most relevant and important and pressing issues. We had a couple of weeks ago some Web meetings inviting renowned brain researchers, and they spent an hour and a half discussing only two or three recommendations, meaning that there was a lot of flesh to the bone. This is what one scientific publication said: "A random sample of the European population is able to debate the potentials and pitfalls of neuroscience without ending in horror stories and far-out science fiction land. " There seems to be some surprise behind this statement. But one ethicist who is active in a national ethical committee said, "To be effective, bioethics must begin to incorporate this kind of citizens’ discussions. "
Did we succeed in influencing policy-making and governance of brain research? As it has been said before: it’s very difficult to measure impact. But still, we’ve invested an enormous amount of time and resources since January of last year to disseminate the results. There have been sessions with parliamentary committees in almost all of the participating member states. We contributed to the public consultation on the European mental-health policy. Next week we will have a meeting with the science officers of the Directorate General for Research, to see how the results of this project can be included in a Seventh Framework Program for Research and Development, which is the major tool for research funding from the European Commission. So we did really an enormous amount of work on communicating and discussing these results. One important EU Commission official said, "The report informs us of a number of new issues of which we had so far been unaware. " And a neuroscientist goes further. He says, "The citizens have definitely installed a provocative claim needed to start a debate, amendments, and resolutions to be taken by the European Parliament, " which, I must admit, hasn’t happened so far.
Finally: From a methodological point of view, we wanted to set a standard. It’s interesting to see that this project has become a research object in itself. It really gave us confidence to work further. The King Baudouin Foundation decided last year that we would launch an even larger-scale project in a completely other area. It’s called European Citizens’ Consultations. It involves more than 2,000 citizens from all 27 member states of the European Union, talking 21 different languages. And it has as a topic the future of the European Union. It’s again co-funded by the European Commission. Janez Potočnik, the European Commissioner, says, "It’s an excellent way of bridging the perceived gap between citizens and the EU in many areas. "
The conclusions. A transnational multilingual deliberation is possible. It’s very interesting to add a European dimension, the input from different perspectives, to those deliberations. Language, more than panel size, is the limiting factor. That’s also the reason why there’s so little e-deliberation (Internet-based tools) in this, because with the different languages it’s very difficult to deal with. It has been a thrilling experience. And we have a meeting with the organizers next week to see if we’re going to do it again. This is the Web site. You find lots of material in eight languages on it. Thank you.
Graham Farmelo
There’s now time for questions for the previous four speakers that have given us those excellent case studies and show this incredible variety and ambition that they brought to the subject.
Audience
My name is Monica Metzler. I’m with the Illinois Science Council in Chicago. I’ve noticed that a lot of the earlier panelists had a lot of discussion about communication as the important part, and the skill for scientists to communicate in plain language. Since my organization is about providing a forum for scientists to speak with the public and get feedback and answer questions and such, it’s of great importance and interest to us. On the other hand is the idea of bringing in the engaged public and the science-curious public. My question to the panelists is, Do you have any specific suggestions on how to find the right scientists and the right audiences? A physicist from Fermilab once said to me, "We in the science community, we now get it. We understand the importance of this communication ability. But some are a lot better than others in assessing their own ability at communicating, not just their willingness to. " And on the flip side, being that you can’t identify the public them by age, gender, race, or zip code, Do you have specific suggestions on how you find the right audience and the right presenters?
Heather Mayfield
I think the audience thing is easier than the presenter thing, so I’ll take that first. For us to reach more diverse and different audiences, we have found the only way (and it’s not really rocket science) is to go out to those audiences. And we do take Dana Centre programming out into the community. And that’s part of our realization that we have a building in South Kensington, which is the most expensive borough in London, which is one of the most expensive cities in the world. So we’re not going to get a diverse audience there, whatever we do. So we have found the most successful thing to be to take the programming where the people are. And in terms of presenters, we’re a bit ruthless. We do have the occasional person who comes in who actually just can’t communicate. But we do an awful lot of work with people on the telephone, we go out and see a lot of people, and we work really hard with people who are good communicators to get them to come back again and do it again.
Graham Farmelo
Emmanuelle, do you work hard to get your speakers?
Emmanuelle Schuler
This is a very important question, and I actually spend most of my time recruiting panelists. Of all the things that we do—writing the press release to the media and running the event—recruiting panelists is what’s taking me the most time. There are a few things you can do. Over time, we have developed contacts with, I would say, leaders in different communities, whether it’s the artistic communities or scientific communities, in academic institutions. And so I always like to hear someone say, "This person is very knowledgeable and is a great communicator. " So word of mouth is the best for that. So I really seek feedback from people I know. Of course, initially that’s the most difficult step. What do you do initially to recruit the speakers? I spend a lot of time Googling those people, whether they have been involved in other forms of public communication.
Douglas Sarno
Just to add a couple things here. One is the recognition that we have to build capacity on both sides of the aisle. Most people don’t just come to participatory-type environments or engagements knowing how to do it. We really have to help them. We have to teach them. We have to engage them in ways that help them get more comfortable with it and better at it. I know, coming out of engineering school, and other people coming out of science curricula, we don’t learn this stuff. This isn’t part of what we do. This is stuff we have to build into the workplace. And not only build it into it, but we also have to build it into the incentives, to let them know this is an important part of their work life too. That’s missing in a lot of places.
Stef Steyaert
When we invite reference persons, and the next year we will make it even obligatory, they follow a communication course with us before even giving their responses to the citizens’ panels. So we give them communication training on how to speak with the citizens.
Audience
This is very short because it’s basically a follow-up to the previous question. And it’s directed actually to Dr. Schuler, but it’s open to anybody. I’d like to follow up on the citizen participation in the context of how that was defined by Doug Sarno. Do you have any indication that the citizen participants in the Science Café, yours or any of the others, go away feeling like they are enabled and empowered, and follow up on these discussions?
Emmanuelle Schuler
I’d like to have a measure it, but I get feedback from the audience, and I get people who come to me and say, "This is great. I’m going to contact an expert at that university. I want my daughter to be aware of this and that research field. I didn’t know it existed. " And I’ve got people who come to me and say, "Do you know any organization that lobbies for this and that? " Or we’ve got members of the city council who come to the Science Café and interact with the public, so the public becomes aware that they are the point of contact if they have any message to pass to politicians. Now, a measure of this is really difficult. And I know for a fact that education scholars and communication scholars are really becoming interested in this Science Café phenomenon, and hopefully someone will be measuring this effect.
Gerrit Rauws
I think that deliberation and discussion is probably one of the most pleasant ways to learn. It’s a very strong way to learn. It’s not only about democracy and engagement. It’s a very strong learning tool. From time to time, rather expensive. But one can learn a lot from this. It changes people’s lives, and from many perspectives.
Graham Farmelo
Actually, spoiling Gerrit’s blushes, I was at the Brussels meeting, and several people said (and I’m not joking here), they said it was one of the great experiences of their lives to be involved in that process. So it was very, very moving to be there. And I’m not speaking ironically at all.
Audience
I’m Mark Hoffman. I think all these programs are great, and they involve a comparatively very small number of people. And I’m wondering what can be done to somewhat make a majority of the population feel like it matters what they think, so therefore they become willing to put the time into learning more.
Graham Farmelo
Any comment? It’s a valid point. Some of them are representative, but any points about expanding that?
Emmanuelle Schuler
So if I understand correctly, your question is about reaching a broader audience, a larger number of persons. Now, because we have sponsors, we have obligations to report to them, and I write an annual report every year. And some of them come back to me and they said, "This is great, but you know, why don’t we podcast? Why don’t you have a blog? " We do have a blog on the Web site. "How about we do some radio edit or video edit? " And the truth of the matter is that those who participate in those discussions, this is the experience on the spot. And the fact that the audience is learning from each other, to me, is a unique perspective to dialogue between scientists and the public at large. So I do believe that being there, experiencing, as you mention, is a key point to that. And trying to have 200 persons in a room and have an intimate discussion is a little bit difficult. So I have no good answer to your question, but the truth is that it’s true, we would like to reach a better audience, but the fact that there are other Science Cafés in other cities and all over the world, to me, is a sign that all these effects add up.
Douglas Sarno
In a site project like we have at Fermilab, we use a lot of different kinds of tools and techniques to reach a much, much broader audience. A lot of them only want information, and so we’ll use Web sites and news releases and whatever we can to reach a lot of people. But we’ll try to also create environments for as many people as want to come and play a part. What we’ll often use is our core team, like these advisory boards, to host big workshops. And what we do is, we take those workshops and we won’t bring hundreds of people into the room at one time, but break them down into smaller groups so we do get smaller dialogue, and then bring them back into a large group. So we kind of have a lot of different tools that we use to get those large groups to work together.
Audience
Again, thank you for all your contributions today. I’m Jeanne Marie Petschauer. I’m from Community Relations at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in the Department of Energy laboratory family. My question is, I’m hearing a lot of the positive potential and actually implemented programs. I’d like to know more about the pitfalls, what doesn’t work, from all your experience.
Graham Farmelo
How long have you got?
Audience
I was just going to say, if you had to pick one thing from all of the different experiences you’ve had, to maybe provide as advice?
Graham Farmelo
It’s a very good question, of course. It’s so open-ended, that can I just ask you if you could perhaps give me a quick snapshot that went disastrously wrong? Heather, you can start us up on that.
Heather Mayfield
Actually, in these terms, I’m trying to think of something that went disastrously wrong. Things that go disastrously wrong tend to turn around the speakers, as we’ve said. Most of us have pretty positive experiences of enthusiastic scientists communicating well. If you get someone on the floor who is very boring, you’ve lost your entire event.
The question of numbers is really important. All the research in all the different projects says, once you get over 40, the opportunities for genuine dialogue just go through the floor, and actually you’re back in a lecture situation. And I suppose the other thing is that because these projects are expensive, all of us are trying to put electronic media into what we do. I think everybody’s podcasting, they’re Webcasting, they’ve got blogs and sites. And so technology not working effectively on the night has a really, really dire effect on the event itself.
Graham Farmelo
Any more disasters you’re prepared to share? Doug?
Douglas Sarno
The real disasters always happen when there’s a disconnect between what the agency is really willing to do, or the client’s really willing to do, and what they promise. And so oftentimes you’ll see these big programs out there that look wonderful, all these people are involved, and all these people are engaged—but the decision makers, the people who are really behind the scenes, are not sincere. They don’t really mean it. They’re not really looking for input. They’re really trying to do a buy-in process. Those are the train wrecks that I see over and over again. And the problem isn’t just that that project went bad. It’s sort of a black eye for all participatory projects. And nobody realizes it wasn’t really a participatory project to begin with. And so other people look at it and say, "See? They just don’t work. "
Graham Farmelo
I’ll just throw one in, if I may, about a consensus conference I was involved in very peripherally, where the sponsors were one of the UK research councils, and they complained at the end because they didn’t get the result they wanted.
Douglas Sarno
Exactly.
Graham Farmelo
They just didn’t get it. They thought they were setting up a result. It’s crazy. Any more disasters?
Emmanuelle Schuler
Because we live in Houston, Texas (it’s quite a conservative community, obviously), the one difficulty I’ve had is, when we discuss a scientific topic that is heavily debated among politicians, particularly stem cells, embryonic stem cells, I could not get a scientist to commit to come. I had to cancel that event because I just couldn’t. And I tried hard. That’s the first time in six years of Science Café that it happened. And I believe it’s because there’s some fear (maybe "fear " is too big a word), but some fear for scientists to come and be publicly exposed to these questions. That’s the only thing. It didn’t happen, so in that sense it was not a disaster, but behind the scenes, to me it was a failure. But no one knew it.
Graham Farmelo
Some of these techniques might be useful at Brookhaven, because I see in the latest Discover, your machine is described as "The Big Bang Machine, " and there’s a side plate saying, "Might this swallow the whole of Long Island? " So you might need to get some techniques in there…
Audience
The relativistic heavy ion collider is the experiment I think you’re referring to. And actually, I’ve been at the laboratory five years. When I first came there, RHIC (as we call it) had already gone on line. At the very beginning of that experiment, there were a lot of questions about the Big Bang, and are we going to create a black hole, and actually there’s been a lot of dialogue about that. The great part about the community-relations effort has been, we have programs similar to some of the things Doug was describing and others. We actually have a Community Advisory Council who talked about a lot of those things, so we were able, as part of the planning process, to engage that. It hasn’t changed the fact that after all this time there are still people asking that question: is it dangerous and all that. So it’s an ongoing challenge.
Audience
My name is Jean Chu. I work with the Chinese Academy of Science, but for the last ten years I’ve worked with the UN system. And the question is, I’m working in a field about community-managed forecasting and preparedness for natural disasters. Now, this is a controversial field. And I got so far as having two countries, and particularly the Philippines, and ten communities together, local communities, to do science at the local level to see ahead. And we were able to catch six earthquakes ahead of time, in a world that says it’s impossible to see ahead for earthquakes. And the more success you get, the more controversial. And this was a totally volunteer effort. So the question is, If you’re in this business of doing something that’s controversial, having science at the grassroots level, how do you keep the volunteer involved? Are all these case studies with volunteers? And then how do you maintain the voluntarism and get more stakeholders involved in this?
Douglas Sarno
Yes, they’re all volunteers. And when people feel that they’re making a difference, that their participation matters, it’s amazing how much energy they have for something. I just finished an advisory board this fall that I had been running for 13 years, on the cleanup of a very large radioactive-waste facility. And I had four people that were on that advisory board for all 13 of those years. And they met every month for 13 years. If they felt like they weren’t making any difference, if they felt like it didn’t matter, they would have been gone after 13 days. But if they feel like it matters, and they feel like they’re actually contributing, people will stick around and want to get involved. And that will grow, because people will see, Oh, this is making a difference. How do I get involved in that?
Gerrit Rauws
And I think especially at the grassroots level, this works very well. There is very strong commitment. And I learned two things. There’s no topic which is too complicated. It’s only a question of how to communicate and how to present it. And we should certainly not underestimate the citizens. They always do better than even people who are experienced in the field imagine that they will do. So if it’s really on things that are so crucial for their life, their commitment will remain.
Edna Einsiedel
I think on the issue of controversy, the approach that we have found to be most valuable is to recognize the controversy up front, and not try to hide that. And part of the approach involves having a broad range of views presented, so that you don’t have just people who are, let’s say, very supportive of a technology; you actually hear people who are very opposed. And I think that that helps in the process.
Graham Farmelo
Let me just say, I think we’ve heard some fantastic projects and fantastic overviews here this afternoon. It’s immensely encouraging, I think. I think if Benjamin Franklin were sitting here, I think he’d be enormously enthused to see the potential that these ideas are bringing to society. But there is a long, long way to go. And if you think of the level of engagement with really serious scientific issues, frankly, it is derisory in the big picture. Just think, for example, of the issue of climate change, which David King said memorably was much more important than terrorism as a national threat, indeed a global threat. Look at the level of engagement there. Just imagine that in the blogosphere you had one percent of the engagement in that issue that we’re going to see over the next six weeks in American Idol. Just imagine the impact that would make. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen, for your questions. And thank you very much for the panel.