 So, was sitting in the physics department T-room and I told an astrophysicist colleague that I'm thinking about public engagement because I'm going to talk about it at this year's National Digital Forum. What's that, he says? It's the annual get-together of the glam sector, I reply. Glam? He looks puzzled, bemused. I realise this is what he's thinking. I seen through my abstract for the conference describing how across the glam and the steam communities we're all talking about how we do public engagement better. Asking if we're talking to each other and if we have any kind of shared language between our two sectors, that makes sense. I get back this lovely email accepting my abstract but just checking that I meant steam. Surely I meant steam? Maybe I meant steam. I've avoided using steam for a reason. Steam is a little bit like this. I know it's cheesy. But steam is science, tech, engineering, the arts and maths. And it does provide a place for me, a historian in a physics department, to feel like I might fit in somewhere. So before I'd even got here, I'd answered one of my questions. Do we have any shared language that makes sense? Science thinks you lot are a bunch of glam rockers and you folks might think of us as a lame plant diagram or a steampunk cosplay. So how about the public? They're the ones we're trying to engage with through a variety of means. The British National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement which assists with and assesses UK universities' public engagement activities defines public engagement thusly. And I'm really interested in the fact that its activities and benefits, its higher education and research and that its define has been a two-way process in listening and the goal of generating mutual benefit. OK, so far so good. So what does public engagement in universities in New Zealand actually look like? For a start, forget digital. We're still thinking public engagement is schools' visits and guest speakers. Our institutions see this type of public engagement like the Maka Senatus Publicus Curro Manus. It's just like a stamp. We've done that. It's all done. Put it on your APR which is your annual performance review. There's little need to assess or measure, derive benefit or reach out beyond the schools and public lectures model. So what I've been contemplating is attention between space, place and multiple publics. Space. Where we meet the public matters, a public lecture delivered by a visiting academic in a university lecture theatre is very different to that same lecture being delivered in a genuine public space, be that virtual or actual. And Habermas said we call events and occasions public when they are open to all in contrast to exclusive or closed events. He wasn't really thinking about the fact that a lecture theatre might feel public for those of us who are used to university campuses. But to negotiate a university campus, follow the arrows to a public talk, figure out the arcane room nomenclature. All of these things are hard for people who aren't used to university campuses. And I really wonder whether what we would call from inside a university is the same thing as somebody outside a university would call a public talk. So place. If we conduct our public engagement activities past times, their schools visits and public lectures in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, are we genuinely reaching out to multiple publics? Confining our activities to centres that have a university again reinforces the sense that it's people who have knowledge of universities that can access the engagement we're trying to do. If we are to dream of what yet may be seen in Johnsonville and Geraldine, we need to be present in those places. Now, presence needs an understanding of multiple publics, and I have to thank Mike Dickinson for reminding me of this. I still recall the first time I used the phrase, multiple publics, in a Te Punahamaatatini strategy meeting, and I had a table of scientists, most of whom are physicists and mathematicians, look back at me sort of balefully and go, is that even a thing? And I explained when you're sponsoring a lecture series and the events person who's organising it tells you that it's really great to get your eminent science speaker in front of an arts festival, because that's a whole new audience. That's not really multiple publics. University outreach or engagement tend to have two fokai. We concentrate on school kids who have to be there. Right? And we also concentrate on already engaged publics, so people who know about events and things that happen at universities. What I said to my colleagues at that meeting was, we focus on people like us or people like our students, and that's actually just not good enough. So what does a new model of public engagement look like for science? I've got two images at play in my head. The first one is this. Your local kindergarten or play centre collage table to which each kid brings their subjectivity. Their own choices, their culture, heritage, preferences, artefacts and taonga, and they make something new. Now a really good early childhood teacher doesn't impose structure on the creative acts at that table. They wait, they leave space for the child to make their own meaning with the tools they have in front of them. Now this is St Halleya's Church and Community Centre. It's where my 11-year-old daughter has her piano lessons on Wednesdays. When I go there to pick her up, there are always at least seven things going on in that building. Piano lessons, after-school care, children's choir, dance classes, senior exercise classes, a meeting or two. There'll be an MP or a local board member talking to constituents and there's always a table with free excess produce from someone's garden. There's a tangible sense that this is a public space teaming with multiple publics using it for their own purposes. So what I'm kind of thinking about is that a public space, be that virtual or actual, must be a place that provides both the collage table, quiet space in which people can create meaning, and the community centre, dynamic space filled with meaning makers from multiple publics. As universities struggle to think more deeply about public engagement, we need to learn from you who inhabit spaces that bridge this quietude and this dynamism. So please come and talk to me about it.