I’m five months (heavens, am I really?) into a research project in Open Science and Public Engagement. It’s really rather unfair to carry out a project looking at Open Science without working openly myself, so hence this blog.
Open Science is an emerging approach in which the whole of a project and its data are made available for anyone to follow, analyse and potetially contribute to. Public engagement is variously defined but my current favourite comes from the Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE): ‘mutual learning by publics and by scientists’ and ‘recognition of the importance of multiple perspectives and domains of knowledge’.
When a research project embraces Open Science, there is automatically a public engagement component – if the science is out there, someone who’s interested will find it. I’m interested in finding ways to allow the ‘mutual learning’ to happen: not only that the science becomes open for public engagement but the public engagement feeds back into the science.
Ann's Blog 
Looking forward to hearing more about your research project! I am going to post a link to your blog in the FriendFeed rooms on Science2.0 and Science Commons – you might find those rooms very interesting for public engagement.
Lisa
Thank you Lisa. Astonishing – public for only a few hours and up comes something interesting. I’ll be visiting both rooms soon.
Your post was linked by Lisa Green on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0/7a1b39dc/found-this-nascent-blog-from-someone-working-in . If you don’t know about it yet, many great discussions about open science are carried out on FriendFeed. Good luck with your project!
FriendFeed is a whole place I haven’t explored yet. Thank you very much, Steve.
Hi, Ann!
Just offering a welcome word, too, via the FF crowd. Also, am considering my own bit o’ research soon and looking to do it openly, so am very interested to see what you’re up to!
Ann, look forward to hearing more. We need more people giving us some ideas about how the reality of Open Science pans out and how we can get more people involved. Would love to hear more about mutual learning – that’s certainly something that a lot of use are interested in. And great to see people taking their research on “open” out into the open.
Welcome to the Open Science blogosphere! I do think you will like FriendFeed, particularly the Life Scientists and Science 2.0 rooms.
Hi, Ann.
Somehow, Vista was working slow and didn’t open up the whole page when I clicked. So, now I’ve followed to the website and have some questions! (btw, my background is anthro, applied sociolinguistics, and theoretical linguistics, though now I would classify myself as an applied discourse analyst who really teaches undergrads how to write scientific prose:-)) — in any case, I’m personally very interested in the boundaries (for lack of a better term yet) your project represents in defining “cultural” and “social” — IMHO, culture is derived from social behavior when representation as a cognitive ability kicks in (think very early on, developmentally — works with little kids and language/social acts). This is a debate friends and I used to have in grad school: which came first, action or meaning? Although many of us were studying semantics of various kinds, we often whispered that it really looked as though action came first — it is the rung that meaning gets hooked on. When meanings accrue and forms systems of their own (complex systems theory, applied in our case to language), they no longer hinge on actions. I am really curious, then, how you have added “representational” (symbolic) type meanings to the robots? — if the answer is technical (having to do with computer programming and such), I won’t understand it, but would love to read it nonetheless! This is particularly interesting in terms of “memes” which I have understood to be units of cultural meaning known through behavior, but not themselves defined as a kind of behavior. Is this how you are using the term?
Very cool stuff. I look forward to watching this over the next several years!
You’re right. One of the many interesting things about the artifical culture project is that they’re deliberately asking that question: what is culture? I’m just an observer of the project but tryign hard to get to grips with all the notions behind it, to interact usefully with the researchers behind it. I’ve forwarded your comments to the project leader – he’s in a much better position to answer them than I am!