SpotOn London: Public participation in research

The plan was two speakers in London, one participating online, from New Orleans. Didn’t quite go like that, as Cindy Regalado (@CwB_London) had travel problems and was forced to participate from the security queue in Madrid airport. Truly, she did – her phone went through X-ray while she was listening. With no webcam on the conference centre computer, Shannon Dosemagen (@sdosemagen) had only a sound feed, although we in London saw her perfectly. Might have been smoother if my skype-ineptitude had been less evident; I had the two of them online at the start but then Cindy dropped out. If I tried to add her back to the conversation, I lost Shannon! And if I got Shannon back, I lost Cindy! None the less, both coped wonderfully and made a fabulous contribution. As, indeed, did the audience – I’m so grateful they stuck with it.

Enough of my technical maladroitness; on to the session content. The idea came from a suggestion on the SpotOn wiki that there should be ‘something about Citizen Science’. I thought there might be some momentum in moving the discussion along a bit, focussing less on Citizen Science and more on Public Participation in Research. My interest is in open science and how it can support public engagement but along the way I have become interested in questions of how it could also support co-creation and collaboration by professional scientists and members of the public. I’ve been following the ExCiteS project, of which Cindy is a member, for a while, so was pleased when she agreed to join in. And Cindy introduced Shannon, who is a member of the Public Laboratory for Technology and Science. This gave the session plan a nice trajectory from philosophical questions of what we mean by ‘public participation’ (me), to working with communities (Cindy), to issues of participatory research (Shannon).

 (At this point, I should  admit that the strain of speaking, discussion-moderating, twitter-feed-following and question-listening all at the same time meant something had to give. I’m sorry that something was taking full notes of what my fellow speakers were saying. Happily, we had quite a detailed session plan, so what follows is based on that, plus the bits I can remember.)

My introduction began with some reflections on what we mean by citizen science. Increasing public involvement in research can enhance the process, reflect alternative perspectives and bring new skills and expertise to research. But this involves something of a change of paradigm, as scientists are nudged from their traditional role of research designers and decision-makers. But will participants – whether professional or non-professional – need to develop new skills? How can we support the real-time, person-to-person communication that collaborative projects will need? What contribution can members of the public make? How will the roles of scientist and citizen change and develop? Does collaboration limit the issues and questions that research projects can be addressed? What can collaborative projects achieve? And finally, how do we value the contribution of members of the public?

Cindy picked up from there, beginning by considering the difference between citizen science and citizen scientists. The community projects with which she is involved challenge notions of what ‘people’ can do; but how do we value the contribution of citizen scientists in a world where complex issues require a widening of the dialogue, not only in  decision-making but in problem-solving as well. Engaging people (volunteers) in citizen science projects vs. people taking issues into their own hands and starting their own investigations brings with it issues of validity and credibility. 

Shannon described the work of the Public Laboratory, a group of activists, educators, technologists, and community organisers who are developing open-source, DIY tools to support participatory research. For example, they have d-i-y kits for mapping and environmental monitoring, using tethered balloons. They also have a d-i-y spectrometer. PLOTS has eight principles that underpin its work, including (and I’m really sorry but I didn’t get them all written down!) the central importance of transparency and accountability. For example, their balloon monitoring kits are physically attached to a person on the ground; this is an immediate indication of who is doing the monitoring. PLOTS tools are open source; likewise, they ask that participants share the outputs of their work with the community – and encourage attribution of results. They also believe data should be readily understandable, hence a preference for maps and other visual representations.

The discussion that followed was lively, thank heavens. At one point, the audience started arguing amongst itself, which is always a good sign. I love it when the speakers don’t have to say anything. The twitter stream from the session is here (unfortunately, the livestream failed and so did the recording). Discussion comments included (again, I didn’t get them all):

What motivates people to participate in research? Are people more likely to participate if there’s something in it for them? This linked to comments made in the SpotOn session on crowdfunding.

What about people who participate in medical research?

Engagement can be a positive benefit for research – that’s the best reason to do it.

Some scientists have a negative attitude towards public engagement – are they likely to have a similar attitude towards public participation?

Are there some sciences that require sophisticated laboratories and may be just too complex for public participation? (Asked by someone who researches something hideously complicated in neural signalling.) Shannon noted that PLOTS is creating a d-i-y spectrometer; Biopunk and Madlab also mentioned.

Importance of scientists engaging with people, not at people.

Some journals won’t publish work based on contributions of citizen scientists, due to concerns about credibility and validity of data; how do projects overcome this?

How do we acknowledge the contribution of citizen scientists? Some kind of micro-attribution? More than acknowledgements, less than named authorship? 

Happily, Cindy managed to get back in for a few closing remarks. Unhappily, just as she said “there’s an interesting quote I want to close with”, she was cut off again. What she intended to say was: Citizen Scientists can’t draw a line between their professional activities and responsibilities towards society as a citizen.

Scientists are citizens; citizens are scientists. Publics are scientists; scientists are publics. Thanks to everyone who participated in this session.

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The Pope Clement Dichotomy

There is an irony in being a person interested in online engagement with science, digital research, social media and divers public stuff and yet being a person who twizzles up inside when she thinks about writing a blog post. Like Pope Clement VI sitting out the Black Death, I am caught between two fires.

I’ve been telling myself I’d write a post when the results of my PhD oral examination and thesis were properly sanctioned but really, the official procedures take an unconscionable time, hence the embarrassingly long gap. To bring you up to date, back in the summer I survived the oral exam.  and the examiners recommended I be awarded the PhD subject to some minor amendments to the thesis. I’m currently waiting to hear if the corrections have been accepted.

However, revenons à nos moutons, next week is Open Access Week around the world so I must ignore the flames of personal squeamishness and stoke the blaze of professional openness.

I will be playing a small part in the University of Exeter’s Open Exeter events, to talk about whether open science can be a shared space for fostering public engagement with science. The fact that citizens, community groups and NGOs are demanding – and in many cases getting – access to evidence that enables us to scrutinise research and participate effectively is widely recognised – for example by the Royal Society. That being so, we have to think about the relationship between professional and non-professional researchers; why might members of the public want to contribute to research? what knowledge and expertise will they bring? what new skills will participants need to develop? how are the contributions of all participants to be valued?

I’ll be helping to discuss the issues a bit further at SpotOn London, in November. With Cindy Regalado and Shannon Dosemagen, we want to explore citizen science as public participation in research. The spirit of SpotOn is very much about collaboration, connection and community discussion, so I intend to be as provocative as I dare! I’ll be starting the session by asking eh question of what we mean by ‘public participation in research’. Can we move beyond the concept of public participants as data suppliers, data organisers  and human computers (effective though we might be in those roles and exciting as many people find such participation). How we can open science support co-creation and collaboration? How will the roles of ‘scientist’ and ‘citizen’ change? What happens when scientists are nudged from their traditional role as research designers and decision-makers? How do we value the contribution of the expertise and skills of citizen scientists? What ethical considerations are involved in challenging the notions of what ‘people’ can do? How do we value the validity and credibility of the contributions of citizen scientists? What are the current issues in participatory research in environmental and health research structures?

SpotOn will be livestreamed and tweeted (hashtag #solo12citizen). It will be interesting to see if the conversation goes beyond the room and into the open air.

“Foster child of silence and slow time”

“And then, of course, building in space for reflection …” I quite surprised myself a few days ago when that popped out of my brain during a discussion with participants in the Science Communication Masterclass about how we went about planning events.

Surprised, because when I was first introduced to reflective practice two and a half years ago, I struggled to see the point. But I dutifully plodded on, incorporating it into my work until, almost unnoticed, it’s become natural, important and something I’m now suggesting to other people.

Maybe I shouldn’t be startled. I love abstract art – Mondrian, Matisse, Hepworth. I love editing written work – getting as close as possible to that magical pivot between minimum words and maximum explanation. For me, reflection makes sense as mental editing – catching experiences, mulling over their qualities and weighing them against knowledge. Paring thoughts down, trying to capture their essence and express them pithily.

I haven’t yet reached complete pith; I rather tend to waffle and persiflage, although I have written one or two paragraphs I think are pretty good.

But effective reflection takes time. Integrating experiment into practice and thence to understanding isn’t something (for me, anyway) that happens quickly. I’m lucky; the last two and a bit years have offered me unprecedented time to develop my thoughts (I’m still not sure anything useful will come out of it but I live in hope). PhD research might be meagre on bread but it’s rich in time to feed the soul with hyacinths; I’m unlikely to have such space afforded me again.

Silence is equally vital. Tentatively unravelling the strands of my thoughts and knitting them into solid sense can’t be done against clamour. Fortunately, I’m trusted to work at home for most of my time, where I look over my laptop’s screen on to my garden and my house’s thick Edwardian walls block out most unhuman noise.

Time crops up a lot when I talk to interviewees. Time flies. Time is like an ever-rolling stream. Time is of the essence (rapid move from poetry to the law!). Researchers taking an Open Science approach could be in danger of releasing a deluge of data and information on to the world. Does anyone have the time to deal with all that … stuff?

As I pondered in a previous post, does all that information muddy the water, making it impossible to see beneath the surface? Does it put science in the way of becoming like modern governments, which have to create policy lines in the sand in the face of the relentless tide of 24-hour news?

Unless you’re one of the rare but admirable researchers who runs an open notebook, committing to an open approach can be seen as taking time “away from the ‘real’ work”. It takes time to think through what it all means, write up the notes, tidy up the spreadsheet, comment the program code … but hang on, aren’t these processes truly a vital part of the real work; taking time to analyse, to evaluate, to ponder, to categorise … to reflect? Apparently doing nothing isn’t not doing anything. By making us stop doing in order to make what we’re doing transparent, Open Science could slow things down a little but such procrastination might be the donor, not the thief.

PS: by coincidence, my supervisor recently pondered the virtues of slow science in his blog. An object lesson in how to be an incredibly busy person but still reflect effectively!

Closed

I tried to do it the way the academy wants, truly I did. I submitted my abstract, sent in my slides, wrote my paper and turned up at the conference. I won’t defame the local organisers by saying which conference; those who really want to can work out which major international conference on science communication happened late in 2010.

Murphy’s Law: everything that could possibly go wrong did. The abstract was lost, the registration process worked one time out of three; my slides didn’t make it, at one stage I was in the programme to speak in two sessions (both of them the wrong ones), my talk eventually vanished altogether and the paper never made it to the proceedings.

I did get to stay on for a very good holiday (but that’s the subject of another blog) although the scars still sting. I can almost think about it without howling but the pain lingers. Some would say it’s partly my fault. I am very organised; I send everything in at least a week before the deadline, which means there was more time for them to get lost.

So, not even in the conventional sense has the work been made available. Time to practice what I’m researching others doing; turn to the currently unconventional – and open. I’ve put it in my university’s open repository (or at least, started the process that will eventually land it in the repository) and now I’m making it available here. It’ll be fascinating to see if anyone engages with it: one of my mantras is that openness – and the Internet – means that if anyone is interested in something (however obscure) they can get to the information.

Last time I looked, my readership was in single figures; hope you enjoy it, guys! Let me know what you think.

Muddying the waters or clearing the stream

People practise Open Science for all sorts of reasons. They might be philosophical: it is A Good Thing-in-Itself. Or they might be pragmatic: it’s a way to get information out to as wide an audience as possible (and maybe back in again, but that’s another topic). But does making information directly available to anyone clear the stream of communication or does the data surge muddy the waters with a deluge of unfocussed, unclear and unvetted comment?

how do I open … let me count the ways

Does it matter that definitions of what the ‘open’ in open science means are many and various? Naturally, I’ve asked everyone I’ve interviewed (that’s around 25 people) what ‘open’ means to them. Naturally, I’ve had 25 subtly different answers.

Within the community of scientists, a delicate structure of rules has grown up that sustains our trust in ourselves. We trust each other to cite references properly, to attribute thoughtfully, not to jump each others’ claims and knock down small children in the rush to publication.

Thing is, the rules are largely implicit and maybe you have to be a fully-paid member of the academy to get them. But as the furore over the leaking of emails from UEA (which I won’t cheapen by referring to as Climateg*t*) showed, in the light of common day, expectations can be very different.

The Russell Review – one of the tribunals that investigated the issue – found that while there was no reason to doubt the rigour and honesty of the scientists involved, there had been a ‘consistent pattern of failing to display the proper degree of openness’.

What exactly is the proper degree is a moot point. Does it matter that – as my 25 replies show – definitions of what the ‘open’ in open science means are many and various? I don’t think it does; the important thing is to be open in the first place – as open as feels comfortable. As the leaked emails saga shows, it’s easy to confuse ‘normal process’ with ‘deliberately secretive’. Openness can help … open things up. Humans have evolved pretty sophisticated ‘oops that’s not quite right’ detectors over the millennia but we need something to work with. We need the whole picture; the photograph, the list of other publications, the funders, the research question, the blog. It all helps build the narrative; even the twitter post about the particularly nice cup of tea they just had.

In the process of …

Don’t get me wrong … it’s wonderful to have the time, space and freedon to read and think but I’m a scientist at heart and I’ve been itching to be ‘doing’ something.

And in the spirit of open science, I should tell … whoever’s reading this … that I am actually doing something. No, it doesn’t matter that I haven’t processed the data yet. Or that I have the teensiest possible amount of data to process as yet. The point is, I am in the process of …!

I’ve plunged in and done my first interview, with a generous scientist who kindly gave up an hour of his time to answer my rambling attempts at questions. A small step but I am ridiculously excited about it.

I’m mid-way through transcribing the interview as we speak. Writing this post is by way of giving my poor ears a rest.  There are two reasons to give my ears a rest: one physical – not being of the ‘digitial native’ generation (my first calculator was a slide rule), my ears scream after more than an hour with earphones in. and one mental – can anyone bear to listen to themselves in a recording?

The conversation was interesting and of course, as any good conversation should, threw up more questions than answers. For example – I’d missed an obvious point – I need to find some open science sceptics to talk to. And then there’s publishing … and journalism … and education …

A barrel of herrings to look over in case they turn out to be red.

Public engagement means points

I’ve read in a few places now that one of the reasons scientists give for not taking part in public engagement work is because, bluntly, it’s not part of their funding and they don’t get recognised for it.

This could be about to change in the UK. The Minister for Science, Lord Drayson, made a speech last week that committed the government to rewarding scientists who engage with the public. The government, he said, took public engagement very seriously.

However, the Times Higher Education supplement wrote much more clearly about his speech. See the article here.

Parallel citizenship?

One of the things I do in the evenings and weekends is copy-editing. Lots of different stuff – textbooks and science and philosophy and religion and …  I love helping other people make the sort of book they really want to write. (I am, however, famously nit-picking and pedantic. Don’t come to me if you want to use ‘impact’ as a verb.)

The book I’ve been working on recently is a beginner’s guide to journalism, one of the chapters of which is about the future of journalism now that we’re all content-providers (this, being said on a blog, is looking dangerously incestuous).

What intrigued me is that how ‘citizen journalism’ could be replaced by ‘citizen science’ and the sense would have been exactly the same. Citizen journalism is democratising, heralds the beginning of ‘bottom-up’ journalism but are standards under threat? Instead of carefully-crafted news, are we faced with a flood of pseudo-news? Rather than a tightly-argued discussion of a complex event, will readers be left to weave the narrative for themselves from a bunch of hyperlinks? What happens to quality and content when untrained ‘news bunnies’ are let loose? While blogging and micro-blogging open up critical debate, do they also increase the quantity of unverified fact at large in the ether?

The zeitgeist is changing. From advertising to zoology, the old metrics don’t work as well any more. So we have to create new ones but in doing so, we’ll set everything in flux and have to go through a period of some pain.

From the conference (II)

Maybe it’s because I’m a neophyte conference attendee but why are many of the sessions telling us things I think we already know?

It troubles me that scientists are still able to say that one of the reasons they don’t get involved in public engagement activities is because such work isn’t valued by their universities. I’ve read it in academic papers and I’ve heard people say it here at the conference.

The first of today’s sessions was  a panel session with three scientists well-known for their communication work on screen, on radio and in print. All of them also professors either of public understanding of science or science and society. All very enthusiastic to promote scientists’, universities’ and even industry’s involvement in PE.  But they also told us more or less the same things.

Hmm … I’ve given talks at conferences too. (All outside the UK, as it happens.). Maybe I’ve told people what they already know as well …

Stop press – I take some of that back: just heard a very interesting ten minutes on the nature and qualities of evaluation and what it says about science communication.

At the conference (I)

Posting at the science communication conference, so apologies for the telegraphic style. But, appropriately, am in a session on blogging, Twitter and social networking.

–just discovered the twitter feed for the conference is #scc2009–

This morning, Johnathan Porritt, the keynote speaker, took the traditional triumvirate technique. Trust, Tone, Transparency. Since I finished the last post saying I needed to think about trust – good connexion.

 Does trust require certainty? Climate change (Johnathan’s interest) is debated; in an uncertain world, how do we know when to trust? The process of science is dynamic and uncertain – and would we want it any other way – which makes it exciting but not necessarily trustable.

How do we convey the excitement of science-a-it-happens and generate trust?