🔥 IGNITE 🔥

Fun, short, crowdsourced and reproducible SciComm workshop aimed at young scientists.

Versão em português (BR) aqui.

Welcome!

I am truly happy to see you here! This is a completly open project, and you can copy, contribute, replicate, reproduce, cut it in half, glue it together, put some glitter on it... and make it even better! Here you can find resources to promote a fun Science Communication workshop (or even study by yourself!).
SciComm is the diffusion of knowledge, and the communication of science and technology among professionals and to the public. Therefore, in this workshop you will find resources to better communicate with non-specialists, and this includes also other scientists.
So if you love SciComm and Outreach, jump right in and I am certain that you will find something useful in this repository. Enjoy!

• Why this project exists?
• Who am I?
• How can you help building the workshop?
• How can you use it?
• Want to know more?
• Call me maybe!

Why this project exists?

Science communication can empower people. Once we understand how science works, and we learn to tell gossip from trustable facts, we can make better choices and feel secure about them. This is why I believe that SciComm and outreach are so important in our society, because it protects us from manipulation.

Although we have amazing communicators doing their jobs in SciComm, we need scientists to help us in this mission. But there is a gap there: scientists are not trained to communicate their work to non-specialists (which can be really hard!), and they often think they can't do it. Also, they feel discouraged to do SciComm because they don't associate it with concrete benefits to their careers.

But could we deny ourselves to the crowd and still remain scientists?
Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo

SciComm is an interdisciplinary field and this is how this project was born: why not gather people with different skills to build a comprehensive SciComm workshop aimed at young¹ scientists?

Who am I?

I am a grad student from Brazil and I've been concerned about SciComm for years. When I was a teenager (already dreaming about being a scientist), I thought that would be great to write about science, and make it fun and accessible. Then I grew up, became a scientist, and now I write and talk about it! As most scientists, I was not trained to do it, but fortunately I've met amazing people in my journey who helped me. That's why this project is so important to me!

How can you help?

If you are so excited about the project as I am, you can jump in and help!

Surveying scientists

The first thing is to know what scientists need to start doing SciComm. What are their main difficulties? What is the SciComm medium they like the most? How could the workshop help them? It would also be interesting to understand how scientists are sticking to SciComm after the workshop.
To do that, we will elaborate a couple of surveys and collect some data. YAY! 🎉

Build the workshop

The main need is to build a "starter kit" with the main content of the workshop and guidelines to promote one. This kit will be composed by courseware, activites, resources and a simple organizer workflow (see details on Issues).

Bring your ideas!

Bring your creative ideas to make the whole program even better! We will need a visual identity, a website, to build content, to spread the word, prospect funding, write funding proposals, prospect experts in each field to participate as lecturers, and we could also think about puting up an incentive program to encourage scientists to keep in the SciComm path... Phew!

Please, read more about contribution in our Contribution Guidelines, our Code of Conduct and our Roadmap.

How can you use it?

If you want to run the workshop in your city, you'll just need to download or fork the repository, adapt the content to your needs and follow the organizer wokflow suggestions (if you want to). I'll be really happy to recieve your feedback! Please, read our license to make sure you understand all the possibilities.

Want to know more?

You can explore this repository for further details. If you want to work on IGNITE, please read the contributor guidelines. There you can find the roadmap and the open issues we are currently working on.
Also, this project is being supported by the Mozilla Open Leaders program. If you want to learn about open projects and this program, you can follow their updates.

Contact

If you have any questions, suggestions or jokes to share, you can simply open an issue here in this repository. You can also send me an e-mail, if you need. Wanna hang out on social media? Follow me on Twitter or Instagram.

Consider joining us at the Mozilla's Global Sprint May 10-11, 2018! We'll be gathering in-person at sites around the world and online to collaborate on this project and learn from each other. Get your #mozsprint tickets now!

I hope IGNITE inspires you! 🧡

1: "Young" here refers to a state of mind. 😉