Sciencehorizons

A new government funded "PEST" programme, Sciencehorizons, was launched yesterday. A series of events will run nationally over the next 6 months, aiming to get people discussing their hopes and fears for future technologies. The discussions will be fed back to the government and could help shape future science policy.

Sciencehorizons aren't just running events at places like Dana, but have provided interactive packs to download, so you can run their own dialogue events. The BBC news story's spin on them is "science by cartoons". To spark discussion, the packs use cartoon characters of "everyday folk" living in the future.

(click on the image to see a bigger version if you want to read the text)

Personally, I think the resources look more like something aimed at people in their early teens than adults. Which I'm sure isn't the (patronising?) tone they'd want to go for. But that's just my view, maybe it is a great way of engaging people with science policy. I'll keep an open mind, at least till the results come out.

Session 9: risk (and intro to science policy)

We started with a debate, asking whether scientists are the best people to make decisions about science policy. If anyone wants to continue/ join this (with ideas on why scientists should or should not be the people to make policy decisions over science) we can start a thread in the comments to this post.

In terms of lecture content, we went through some key ideas in science policy and gave a brief overview of the topic of risk, especially issues of risk reporting in the media. All of this is covered in the handout (see WebCT). If anyone missed the class, read the chapter on "The ABC of Risk" in Gregory & Miller.

If anyone was particularly inspired by the topic of risk, Les Levidow is talking about GM issues at UCL this evening, details here.

I'm sorry if today was a bit rushed, I stupidly planned for a double session. I'm going to turn the activity we didn't get a chance to do (on sensationalism) into a blog entry - watch this space.

Class 8: Dialogue for policy

If the public are knowledgable and capable in dealing with science, then why shouldn't we involve them in science policy? And how could we do this?

These were the big questions of today's class. The work of critical authors - and the fact that we live in a democracy, and that millions of pounds of taxpayer's money goes to pay for public science - points us towards the need to engage publics in the science policy process. What this means in practice, we seemed to decide, varies from case to case.

A key point in solidifying these arguments was the 2000 House of Lords Third Report on Science and Society, which argued that "...direct dialogue with the public should move from being an optional add-on to science-based policy-making and to the activities of research organisations and learned institutions, and should become a normal and integral part of the process." A few years later, Demos argued that this dialogue should move 'upstream', to early in a technology's development, rather than just being tacked on at the end.

There are lots of ways of doing this. Participation mechanisms vary from e-consultation to consensus conferences to science shops to small group deliberations. The important thing is to fit the mechanism to the situation and to be clear about the aims and outcomes. As the GM Nation? debate proved, people rapidly lose patience with being engaged merely for PR purposes...

some useful sites...

...for this Monday's class. We'll be talking about science shops, consensus conferences, citizen's juries, and other kinds of deliberative dialogue. We'll also be discussing part of this Spiked debate and the 2000 House of Lords Third Report on Science and Society.