It has been interesting to follow people discussing some of these issues. I am sometimes torn between thinking that govt. depts can do a perfectly good job of researching issues in-house but there are times when they need to out-source them to a 3rd party that does this sort of thing all the time. The problem with out-sourcing too much specialist work is that govt. loses people with enough awareness to know how to manage self-styled experts and to realise when they are being snowed. It’s a big problem with IT (as many people know).

It’s probably also a big issue with any sensitive policy issue such as drug addiction or the war on drugs. There are probably many excellent people in govt. depts. who are very knowledgeable about the issues but it would never be acceptable for them to come up with a report that ran counter to the political stance of the party in power.

Re. Science blogging – suppose you should have been there at the conference, the pervading enthusiasm for blogging to supplant the “dead tree” press and lead us to a new Habermassian ideal of the public sphere was almost endearingly cute. But to a certain extent I’m of course charicaturing, it was a really useful meeting.

Thanks to all for your comments again.

Quick response re FOI – I’m happy to mail things directly, but I have one comment re posting stats etc here that might be worth mentioning: i.e. the raw data without the wider context within which it sits might be misleading / uninformative. Reading warumich’s post, it’s clear you’ve got a deeper understanding of the web issues than most (and thanks, again, for your understanding of the difficulties we face); if we post all the data here are we going to get bogged down in the details of a situation we’re already trying to move on from? We’re keen to draw a line under the current web scenario and get moving on the next, improved phase. Happy to do it, just want to know what you think.

That said, I think you should leave the FOI request in place for now as I don’t want anyone to think that my posting here is an attempt to interfere with a perfectly legitimate request. I can totally see why this has been best route for getting info up ’til now, I’m more keen to improve future communications.

Again, more than happy to mail you the required details with some additional commentary if you like and then you can decide how best to handle.

In the meantime, a couple of things – first, I’ve asked a policy colleague to take a closer look at the guest PUS post and see if they can give more detailed and informative responses than I can. Back with you on that as soon as is humanly possible.

Also, this Friday, I’m told, the full Science & Society strategy is to be published. It’s a UK govt strategy, of which DIUS is a part, and it includes details on improving engagement with the science community. I don’t have the details at this stage but will post link as soon as I see it (I’m not in the office on Friday so you may well see it before I do).

BTW, re meeting – doesn’t matter if you’re not in London (tho’ happy to meet anyone who is, of course) – let me know if you want to set something up elsewhere. It’s “UK” government, not “London,” mere geography should not get in the way…

More soon,

Elliot

You write:

I would argue that science blogging, for all the enthusiasm everyone has for it at the moment, has itself serious flaws as a science communication tool.

I doubt that anyone sees science blogging as a sole communication medium as opposed to part of the spectrum of options.

Is a lack of interest in science a problem? Depends on what you call science (to refer to your excellent post). If science includes the ability to assess the statistical support for various political, medical or personal decisions, then – yes, it’s a literacy issue. As someone who has enforced literacy issues (not everything is accessible to a screen-reader) – this is something about which I have very strong feelings. You would probably not believe that amount of data that has no alternative format that I can use. Without access to the core data, I have to take a ludicrous amount on trust which is bad when I don’t necessarily trust the source.

I’d be very interested to follow the whole of the “Science and Society” response your colleague was talking about. If it is anything like the consultation document though I have some grave concerns, as have most of my colleagues, and I wrote the post mainly to try and explain them (as well as link to people who’ve done that much better, as you do). The fact that the social science contribution was summarised in a paragraph in the summary of the responses didn’t fill me with much hope that the eventual strategy will be much different, but I may well have misread it. In any case, I will follow the wider S&S strategy with interest.
That the social scientists in their response called themselves “social scientists” rather than emphasising their competence regarding public understanding of science surprises me somewhat, and I would in that case definitely call their judgement into question.

As for your website, I don’t want to be too critical- unlike my friends here for example I don’t think 600k is actually that much and I can well believe that costs run up pretty quickly (though keep in mind that HW is run for free if we discount the imaginary big pharma millions we’ve all been promised). Also I would argue that your site statistics are (this soon after the launch) completely unreliable indicators of whether you’re doing a good job.
Instead have rather fundametal concerns here that I’m sure you don’t have any particular control over, so I wouldn’t blame the SSW team for them. These would have to do with what you can actually achieve with a .gov website that is charged with “tackling the excitement/awareness issues”.
There are deeply rooted and complex reasons why people are not as excited and aware of science as you would like them to be (ignoring for the moment the issues of why we should want people to be more excited/aware and what that exactly means in the first place). Some can be idetified, such as lack of proper career structures in science (and young people being far from naive), popular media representations of science as nerdy and unsexy etc. Others we have no particular handle on – it may just be a fashion dynamic. If we still have no satisfactory explanation for why flares were ever popular, what hope do we have for explaining science’s unpopularity? Although I would certainly go a step further back and question (sorry wulfstan) the assumption that people are uninterested/unaware of science. Most of the problems identified in, say Goldacre’s book, are not to do with uninterestedness in science but in a lack of knowledge in whom to trust (remember that Wakefield, Holford and McKeith all play on real or imagined scientific authority). If people were uninterested in science a fake PhD shouldn’t be neccessary. And I’m not quite sure what halcyon days we’re comparing the situation with anyway. Were people ever that excited by science? If not, was it such a big problem then?

Another problem: Since you’re explicitly tasked with making science somehow popular, you can hardly be seen as a trustworthy source of advice for any youngster wanting to find out more about science – because you have this agenda. To take an example, the career links about science that I already mentioned. Can I trust you to give me an honest account of how great it is to study science if I know that you’re tasked to big science up? Of course not. And people aren’t that naive. They see a .gov address and think “well they would say that”.
Now that’s not your fault, and I’m glad that with our website (Understanding Uncertainty, since you ask) I don’t have this dilemma. I can be as critical of science as I like.
But this goes to the heart of the social scientists’ critique of the consultation – “Science and Society” is a two way process, as I have argued, and as the name suggests. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a monolithic “science” that can easily communicated when scientists routinely and vehemently disagree with each other, and even who counts as a scientist is itself in constant dispute. But as I said, these issues aren’t news, and how they can be sensibly included in a website with your particular mission is a difficult question, I’m sure.

Now you have to make the best out of the situation you’re in, and I wish you all the best of luck in that. Identifying the blogging community as a resource is a good step (but I would say that of course), though keep in mind that we as a group generally have different aims, concerns and audiences in mind, and therefore the relationship will be fraught from the beginning. But also I would argue that science blogging, for all the enthusiasm everyone has for it at the moment, has itself serious flaws as a science communication tool – I’ve been at the 2008 science blogging conference too, and I was amazed by the lack of sober analysis of what blogs can actually achieve, amid all the undboubted enthusiasm and potential. As with so many things, more research is sorely needed.

These are some hopefully more or less coherent thoughts. Do tell me if I get the wrong end of the stick somewhere, it’s late and I’m not in the mood for proofreading all this. But I’d be more than happy to take up your offer of tea, biscuits and a friendly chat, and unlike the others I don’t live too far from London. I’m fairly busy at the moment though, having just started a new job and one too many projects, but in principle I’d be happy to.

Admin edit: ETA link to Understanding Uncertainty.

FOI requests – understand completely where you’re coming from with those (I’m a fan, they are vital to a long list of freedoms in this country, no criticism here) but we can probably do a lot more sitting round a table. Yes, we should have done this before perhaps (although I’ll also make sure you see the lists of people consulted with and it’s probably much more lengthy than you think! There is certainly no limitation from our end on who can / can’t take part, and we’re keen for as many people as possible to have their say.). An open offer to HW – coffee, perhaps biscuits (out of my own pocket). If you can nominate 2 or 3 people (sensible amount?) to come have a visit, I’ll find answers / people for you to meet and, if you wish, we can have a more general conversation about campaigns like this in general, too. I think it’s a better use of everyone’s time to talk face to face and see if we can’t reach agreement on best ways to move forward – I really do believe we’re all on the same side and want the same things. An “unofficial” meet at first, so everyone on both sides can speak freely, and then I’d like to help open up the methods for engagement with the wider project to make sure everyone knows how to get involved, if they wish to.

Fair enough – I’m very happy to discuss things informally. You can e-mail us on holfordwatch at googlemail dot com. Of course, we’ll happily drop our follow-up FOIA request if you’d like to just e-mail us the information we’ve asked for (and give us permission to publish this on the blog), or post the info here as a comment. And, of course, feel to discuss things on this comments thread in the meantime.

I should say, though, that for some time FOIA requests seemed to be the quickest way to get a response out of Science So What. Until a better system for responding to blogs is in place, they may still be the quickest way of getting an ‘official’ response?

The blog roll stuff is all valid too – but what you saw in the campaign tweeting for people’s suggestions etc is really a combination of research and engagement – getting people to suggest sites they like is a good way of starting a conversation with them. If you aren’t a science specialist it’s going to take time to find your feet, and there was further content and research coming from a number of sources.

Fair enough re engagement. However, I would still have hoped that it would have been possible for Science So What to research a better blogroll from the start. For example, a quick search would have alerted the agency to various sites ranking health and science blogs, and allowed them – along with twittered suggestions – to build a better blogroll and set of links from the start.

I’ve just had a browse of the Sciencewise site – it isn’t fully accessible. The navigation of that website is very poor and some very good initiatives are completely obscured by that navigation options. Eg, you shouldn’t have to drill down 5 levels to find information on how to get involved in the public dialogue. The phrasing of that highlights one of the issues that the people designing that programme see it as dialogue but actually make it difficult for people to find specific information – I also wonder how many of the target groups would respond to an invitation to “public dialogue”. I very much doubt that serious, knowledgeable public engagement people would promote such activities in those terms. For me, this does raise questions about who is involved in these activities and whether people are formulating websites and campaign outlines and then consulting relevant people afterwards, expecting them to rubberstamp the plans, and then claiming that the relevant people were properly involved.

In support of dvnutrix’s point about not starting from here, I suggest that working about what was needed and establishing what already exists should have been done before the campaign was planned.

we need to work out what is best done or supported by government, and where, frankly, we should just get out of the way.

I’m no particular fan of them but an organisation such as Sense About Science might have collaborated with (say) UCL to produce a decent state-of-the-art report which would have given a much better basis for campaign planning. Obviously, not to you, but to other people it does look like a group of people believed they knew best, commissioned a survey to reinforce that impression of themselves, didn’t like all of the responses so disregarded the ones that didn’t fit in with their pre-conceived plans. They then went ahead and launched a campaign without questioning whether it was the right or most effective thing to do.

Maybe it’s just me, but it doesn’t look like the guest blogger’s arguments have been addressed. It looks possible to have a campaign that is a marketing success and yet has absolutely no useful outcomes.

I understand that you are hampered and you don’t mean it that way but the reiteration of speaking in a personal capacity makes it look a little like the playground scenario of being friends with people only as long as other people can’t see you together.

I read about US Airforce Social Media Tool – and that looks like a reasonable strategy. If the US Airforce can do this, and a good tool already exists then it is shameful that UK Govt. can’t formulate a policy within a reasonable timescale. It also makes a mockery of the all the exhortations we’ve had to listen to over the last decade of the UK being a switched-on, digital, open for business 24-7 economy.

I will probably have more to say later.