 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. With me today in the Think Tech studios is Dr. Alicia Wood-Charleson. Welcome Alicia. Good to have you back here. Thank you. Nice to be back. Likeable science is all about how science is a vital and interesting part of everyone's life and we're going to talk about that in a very real way today in the sense that we're going to talk about the management of scientific communities or scientific community management and this is sort of, it's a topic that sort of seems to almost sprung from nowhere in a way within the last few years. I mean there have been scientific associations, you know, microbiologists and ecologists and such but this is something really different now, right? Yeah, it's something I think that has already sort of existed but now is being formalized under a particular term. So the art of scientific community management is not new in terms of how collaborations work and how communication happens between scientists that are doing work but we're trying to formalize the role a little bit more and give people in this role a place that they could sort of identify as being something that they maybe didn't have a term for before but then also try to formalize and institutionalize it as a recognized role in an organization that has value and actually has a formalized job description and a position that can be integrated into a program that's starting up and it ranges from scientific associations like you say, things like AAAS which is the American Advancement of Science all the way through to a lot of alphabet soup that will sort of show some identifiers for those later down to just basic scientific collaborative projects and so these are shorter term projects but oftentimes require a lot of communication between very, very different lab groups potentially around the world and so that's sort of what we're here for now. Yeah, yeah, I'm working with one of those groups right now. I'm doing the external evaluation for the IKIVIA project, a UHF score project that has geophysicists and hydrologists and data scientists and computer modelers and visualizers and microbiologists and all these people don't talk the same language basically. Exactly. Everybody has to sort of, for the expression of hurting, it's more like teaching cats to synchronize swimming, which is really tough to do, right? And so you're involved in at least two or three of these now, right? I am, yeah. So the big one that I wanted to sort of start off with was AAAS Fellowship. I'm wearing the T-shirt for. So on the screen you can see the Community Engagement Fellows Program. This is the inaugural year of this AAAS Fellows Program. The program director, Lou Woodley, in the middle of that picture, this is the picture of us in Washington, D.C. in January, where we all got together and sort of had a moment to kind of get to know each other and start to sort of realize what it is to be a scientific community manager, the different roles we all play, and kind of figure out how we can help the field in a variety of ways. So at the end of our program, we hope to have quite a few resources available for people in terms of, you know, how do you think about managing your community? What stage is your community at? How to sort of conceptualize what your role is and where you fit in your organization? So it's a really good group of people, and there's 19 of us, two of them are at AAAS. The other 17 are around the world. Most of them are in the United States, but some of them are global projects. And it was very interesting. You put us in a room, and it was like trying to facilitate a group of facilitators. We had all done workshops and had meetings and like take notes. And so it was a very interesting dynamic that took a little while to sort of figure out. But it's a very good, it's a very good trusting space now. And we've been able to be very successful so far. Excellent. Now, I imagine that could have been quite funny because the job is sort of of a group. Everyone knows them and it's willing to take them on because this is what you all do. Yeah, fighting each other for. No, I'll take notes. You can't take notes. Yeah, it's rare when you're in a meeting where four people raise their hand to take notes. And so usually it's cricket. Excellent, excellent. And why don't we show, I like that graphic. I think it's number three of ours that sort of gives us a real sense of what it is we're talking about here. Maybe you can sort of walk us through what you were trying to capture on this. So on here are little photographic icons of all of the fellows. And this was actually made by Andy, who is one of the fellows that also went EPSCOR project in Utah. And this is looking at sort of the geographic reach from local at the bottom all the way to global at the very top. And the disciplinary reach from sort of single collaboration to multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary and then to transdisciplinary. And it sort of spreads out how fellows are supporting various local collaborations. Are they working across global networks? Are working across disciplinary. And then there's a solid group that's really working towards this sort of open data, open science kind of structure. So we span kind of the full gamut in terms of how you might think about where science is going and what needs to happen for science to answer sort of the big picture questions these days. Right, and that's why this community management is so important, because that kind of research is just growing all the time. More and more, it's not just a pure lepotopterist that's making exciting discoveries, right? It's that lepotopterist working with a genome analysis analyst, you know, who is himself working with some ecologist and somehow three of these people together are finding something very interesting about the butterfly. Yeah, we're finally getting to a point where, you know, a lot of the funding agencies are doing these collaborative funding designs so that you can really get a systems level understanding of the problem. And, you know, a lot of science is really getting into these really complex issues that require a lot of different viewpoints and different perspectives. And like you said, they might not all speak the same language and so you kind of, it's good to have someone in there to sort of set a space where everybody can still communicate and find value in it while learning how to understand each other, so. Right, right. I used to work when I was at University of Washington with the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network and it was somewhat of the same kind of thing. A lot of diverse people spread out around the country doing very diverse things, even a subgroup of us who were just involved in education and things, trying to bring the new students into the field. But we needed that, those same kinds of supports and materials to get people talking together. And there's a lot of these now. Our graphic number two, I think, shows a few, a few of the alphabet soup, as you were right. Yeah, the alphabet soup. So this is basically just a list of all the organizations and scientific associations that our cohort is affiliated with, all the way from, like I said, the I Utah EPSCORA grant down to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is a very science advocacy program out of DC. AAAS, obviously, is in there and then I'm in the middle somewhere under Research Data Alliance, that round circle called SCOPE, which is the Simon's Collaboration of Ocean Processes and Ecology. And sort of that's the community that I'm representing today in terms of who I manage. And you're also involved in that trellis community down there, right? We're both members of the trellis set up by AAAAS. Exactly. And within it, it has multiple communities, right? There's different interest groups sort of within it. So the trellis platform is designed to basically be a platform for communities to go and have discussions and share documents and post-news events. And so it's basically a platform for communication that AAAAS has really had a very good foresight in realizing that there isn't really a good place for scientists to sort of have those open conversations. And it's interesting because it's, as the world moves to a much more online experience, this is becoming more and more important because you can do Twitter and you can do Facebook and all of those things, but you can't necessarily have the same level of dialogue. And so trellis provides the opportunity for there to be public open discourse, but also to have private groups. And so if your collaboration is sort of starting out and just needs a safe space to throw around ideas before you're ready to communicate that to the wider audience, trellis allows that as well. Right. And then you can open your group up and start inviting members on in and still have sort of offline conversations. And there's all kinds of features that I've only vaguely begun to explore. But there's a lot of interesting stuff shows up there, people have great ideas and pop interesting news articles out. Since it started and since I've been part of this, I think I've onboarded like four or five groups now. And so far, everybody's been very, very happy with how it works. Well, good. As you say, it's different. It's a new way, sort of a new model for communicating. And I suspect is going to do nothing but grow and get bigger and more sophisticated all the time. And I mean, just get one new technological hurdle, we all have to overcome this to learn how to use these things. Yeah. But nonetheless, it's a huge value, and clearly. And it really, it speaks to that idea, because you can't, you can't do everything yourself anymore, right, as a scientist, very few scientists really have all the skills necessary to, to have a fully functioning program. So the key component, I feel like that I try to provide, you know, because we both come from, from very basic research backgrounds. We did the PhD, we did all the lab work, you know, we did all of that. And this is kind of a new alternative career, I feel like that has been quite interesting to sort of see where the path leads, because the tenure track path is a very standard path. You know, you do graduate school, you do a postdoc, you hopefully get a faculty position, you get 10 year and then you sort of just are in your research. And I that's very satisfying for a lot of people. And for me, I had, I had issues sort of following that path, mostly because I find that science is not always as effective as I like it to be, it's not always as efficient as I like it to be, I think communication struggles between labs between floors of the same building heaven forbids between different buildings. And so that always I found quite frustrating. And I found that myself, sort of trying to make those linkages on top of doing my research on top of writing papers and all that kind of stuff. And so this was a interesting opportunity for me to kind of put that aside for a bit, and test out this, literally, it's just sort of networking and finding the right people and making sure that those open communication lines are available. So right, I mean, to some extent, this then ties to a concept that I've gotten very fond of recently called collective impact, right? Where it's sort of the model by which you can attack big complex societal problems. So I ran into this in the issue of water drinking water, right? There's a lot of different groups who have responsibilities for drinking water, there's sort of different turf wars or very different levels of expertise. And you've got to somehow start bringing people together. But beyond it's a very structured collaboration where you say well, Group A, here, sort of here, you're playing this role. And B, you're playing this very different role that's both important or equally important. We've got to agree on some common metrics, some common language, some common processes. But we all recognize we're not all doing everything. And each group has to rely on something on the others, right? And together, by bringing eight, six, eight, 10 different groups together, you can actually get something done, make and move the needle on some of these big, big problems. And it sounds sort of parallel. Well, and I think that's even a parallel to just how civilization works, like this idea that you can have diverse roles in a society. And I think, you know, science collaborations are like that, you know, there are people that will be doing the genomic stuff and the fieldwork and the proteomic stuff and the computer modeling. And not everybody needs to do all of those things. And as much as I would like to think I could, there just isn't enough hours in the day. And so finding ways to simplify how they communicate with each other, so it has literally the lowest activation energy possible, like the lowest hump, in order to get to a point where everything becomes open data and open science in that group, the more effective a collaboration will be. Yeah. And lowering the barriers, that can be done in a whole bunch of different ways, right? When I was in graduate school at the University of Oregon, I loved our science building where I was, was well-designed, it had labs sort of around the outside and then in the center of each floor there was a lounge, nice comfortable couches and coffee maker and little lecture hall or a seminar room. And everyone just gathered there. This was sort of the place where you hung out when you weren't sort of actively in the lab doing things. And therefore we did end up talking to other people across the hall in the other lab, very sort of very naturally without having to sort of search them out and set a time. And I always thought it was a very good sort of physical design of a building simply to encourage it. And as a lot of new business models are going towards that where you have this big building with miscellaneous office space and everybody kind of has one, but there's always places to congregate. And that sort of provides this sort of think tech environment where people can come together and share ideas that they wouldn't necessarily be able to do. And so the challenge is how do you take that and then create it online as well. And as much as we try, we can never get away from the person in person interactions. So one of the things we tell people is make sure you leverage those people interactions as much as possible. You go to conferences or you're out in the field together. But how do you then continue that relationship in an online environment? And that's one of the big struggles I think that we have. Great. And we'll talk about that some more when we come back right now. We're going to have to take a short break. And then I'm going to come back and dig into this more deeply. I'm Ethan Allen here with Alicia Wood-Charleson. We're talking about management of scientific communities here on likeable science and we'll be right back. This guy looks familiar. He calls himself the ultra fan, but that doesn't explain all this. He planned this party, planned the snacks, even planned to coordinate colored shirts, but he didn't plan to have a good time. Now you wouldn't do this in your own house. So don't do it in your team's house. Know your limits and plan ahead so that everyone can have a good time. And you're back here on likeable science. I'm your host, Ethan Allen, with me today in the Tech Studio. This is Alicia Wood-Charleson. Thank you again for being here. We're talking about the management of scientific communities and it's an old idea in new form. And you were saying during the break it sort of borrowed some ideas from the corporate world actually about trying to help be sure people don't get too far apart from the people who they're working with, from the people who they're serving. The trick is now it's trying to do this all in an online environment and make it simple, simple enough at least for us to work there, right? Yeah. So the idea of community management has been around in the corporate world for a long time. And it aligns with kind of a business model in the sense of customer relations and feedback from customers about how things are going and how do you network your customers and provide them what they need and services that they want. And that in itself is a whole field of research and there's programs like the community roundtable that their job is to help corporations and companies actually build a playbook for community engagement. And it's things all the way from, you know, how do you release content? Like how often do you send out material? What kind of material do you send out? What format does it come in? Where does your community live? Is it your email? Is it on Twitter? Is it LinkedIn? And so there's a whole art form and a business model just in terms of figuring out how to engage a community. In the science community standpoint it's a little bit different. And so one of the things that we're trying to do in the program is look at sort of this corporate model of community management and try to translate that back into how is it different from a scientific community management. And one of the big things that come out of it as part of the fellowship we've discovered is there's a whole section on interpersonal skills that isn't really reflected necessarily in the corporate business model because then that one's much more about strategy and communication and engagement and, you know, technical. And ours has that but it's a little bit more like program design, program development, interpersonal skills, and there's still sort of communication and technical side of it obviously. But that interpersonal skill part really I think speaks to who people are, like who kind of has a tendency towards community management. And so one of the things we're trying to do through the program is to help other scientists realize that maybe they have some scientific community management tendencies, you know, maybe they like to organize workshops or do outreach and maybe they do volunteer to take notes and so there's some very subtle things that I think that we all went through as a sort of a revelation that this was kind of a role that we played and something that we enjoyed potentially more than spending two weeks trying to figure out a method for viruses to work in a lab. And so really kind of trying to capture a bit more of the environment and get more of the scientific community aware of the value of what it is and some of those very inherent traits. Right and it's tricky because the scientific community in general has not pretty kind of valued in any real sense interpersonal skills, right? I mean you don't get to be head of a lab by being sort of a nice person and cordial to your colleagues. You do, but there are, yeah, you can, but there are some other strategies that are required. I know we'll supervise you, one point said it is, it's possible to be a scientist and a nice guy, it's not possible to be a nice guy and be a scientist. Yeah. Sort of got to have your priorities straight. Yeah. And scientists and engineers are not particularly known for their social skills. Yeah, warm fuzzy people. So yeah, it's not surprising this becomes a big issue is you've got to sort of cultivate that area and help help grow people, nurture people's recognition. They do actually have at least some capacities to do a little bit of this. Yeah, and I think it's, it's comes in the changing of the dynamic because the single principal investigator funding model didn't require you to do that. You would have your money and your lab and you manage it however you wanted to. This you have, you know, very senior principal investigators who are part of a program and they might have single ways to do things, but they kind of have to figure out how to work together and there might be newer investigators as part of the program that want to fit into that model. And so it's going to take a little bit of time, I think, before we sort of switch over into a more community based vision of what science collaborations are like, but we're getting there. There's good progress. And then there, then there's, you know, much science, for instance, the Ikevala project that we both have some dealings with deals very much with the communities outside of the scientific world deals with the Hawaiian communities, with the military, with civic organizations, the department of natural resources, the board of water supply, all of these groups who traditionally have not particularly worked and played well together. And so now you've got this, you have this sort of added layer of complexity and all the more need to be sure that everyone is hearing the same message, hearing it in a language they can understand, what you're saying before the show about sort of taking on that mindset almost of people with whom you wish to communicate so that you put things in terms that they understand they apply into. And this is where I think having an affinity or some training in science communication, which is what we've talked about several times before, really ties in with this sort of role as a scientific community manager because managing collaborations is called in-reach where you're sort of talking inside the scientists, even if it's transdisciplinary, you know, economists and social scientists. But it's still kind of an academic reality when you start doing the outreach component, working with the community and making sure you have that level of respect and understanding for the culture and especially the historical relationships that you might need to sort of move through and acknowledge and try to find a new way through. It's not an easy job. And so the communication component at that level is extremely, extremely important in, you know, getting, translating what you're going to do when you go out to a well on somebody's land and you're going to test the water, like, what does that actually mean? And so I do think there is a huge component for science communication in this role. Yeah, we were just, I was just at a meeting this morning talking about that very thing and the land owner wants to know what are you going to put down my well? What kind of sensor? What's it going to detect? How big is it? And I would be asking the exact same questions. Yeah, what might it do to my well if it gets lost down there, et cetera, et cetera. What else is it going to involve in my time and energy? Yep. Yeah, all of these, all of these questions. Completely valid. Right. And there's, it seems to me there's an increasing need because there isn't a sort of a rather frightening it feels to me a decrease in the public's understanding of evidence-based decision-making. People, I've been shocked to see that the anti-vaccination campaigns are still alive. I mean, here is, here is something that is well established and the eclipse was sort of a nice counter-example. You didn't, you didn't have a group saying, oh, the eclipse isn't going to happen. No, I think it's going to happen over there. You know, it will happen this time over here. Everyone believed the scientists. They understood the scientists knew pretty much what was going to happen. Exactly where it was going to be, when it was going to be. But with vaccination, this is, it's well established. It saves billions of lives. It's preventing all kinds of epidemics. It has tiny risks, huge benefits. And yet somehow, even people who know this perfectly well, oh no, I don't want to get my kids vaccinated. And we've got to figure out some way of communicating better, right? Yeah, and you like to pick all the really hard questions. It's true. I mean, it's true. And there was a, you know, a big thing like Neil deGrasse Tyson was like, okay, you're going to believe the science behind the eclipse. Why don't you believe the rest of it? A climate change and, you know, vaccinations. And I feel, I agree with that as being a, we don't understand problem. But I think it goes back to our conversation we had before the show about you really have to be relevant to everyone's immediate lives, right? So it's one thing where it's going to get dark for a couple of minutes because the moon passed in front of the sun. It's another thing if you're going to stick a needle in my kid's arm. And I think that really trying to reach those people at a place that they find importance and relevance on these very, very sensitive topics is just where we're going to have to go. And there was a lot of, before the March for Science, which I was part of and was a huge proponent of, and there was some, you know, pushback from the science community that this isn't really the best way to do it. We need to be in the local communities having those conversations. And my response to that is we are, but it's so hard to get people to spend time doing that. It requires a lot of training. It requires a lot of time. It requires all of those networks. And it's just something that's going to take time. And I feel like the, you know, the March for Science is still trying to do that. We're really trying to bring in diversity in STEM and try to appreciate all of the value that these various different organizations have. And so it's just going to take time. And I feel like, you know, there's certain factors that are pushing against us right now that make it much more challenging than it would be if we had buy-in at all levels. Sure, sure. And actually some of what you're saying takes me back to an old, there's an old education model called CBAM, a concerns-based adoption model, and basically said teachers will adopt new and improved practices only when they can see those new practices really address their own concerns. You know, is this going to take more time? Where is that time going to come from? Is it going to cost me more money? Where is that money going to come from? Is it going to make my kids more unruly for a while? How are we going to manage that? Right. You know, they really have to have all your concerns answered before you all sort of, okay, now we'll try it. Yeah, because they work really, really hard as it is to try and change something without necessarily any evidence that it's going to make their lives easier is asking a lot of somebody. Right. And that's similar on a lot of this evidence-based acceptance or non-acceptance of evidence-based reasoning. Yeah. But it is awfully it's awfully easy to sort of think, oh, all we have to do is like lay out the facts. Here are the facts, you know, not ought to convince them, but that doesn't work. We're finding that that's really ineffective. Right. And there was an article recently and I'm going to forget where it came out or who did it, so I apologize. But that looked at the more education you have, the actually more polarized you become on certain topics. And so I think that's a very interesting concept and it's well that we really need to sort of figure out what is it that's becoming more important in certain cases? Yeah. And this is why I think scientific community management is so important because it's trying to help stop that polarization in the sense of make sure that members of these increasingly broad, increasingly diverse scientific communities stay together, sort of stay more or less sitting off the same page as it were, talk to one another in ways they can mutually understand, right? And not go off and on. Yeah, and it's trying to look at scientific questions from multiple disciplines now which where we can talk about what is the social science behind it, what is the economics behind this decision. And so looking at science through these very like transdisciplinary fields we can start to come to people and say, you know, we've looked at this scientific problem through these various lenses as a systems lover approach and we can say, you know, the economics say this and the social sciences say this and, you know, the education component says this and we're going to need to provide a whole suite of answers for people on multiple different levels and that just carries my scientific publication. Good luck. Right. Yeah. Again, it's it's an example of that there are very few yes or no right or wrong kind answers that those current paper and pencil tests they don't occur in the real world. Yeah, humans make everything more complicated. But the this business of yeah, you've got you've got to tell different people sort of different versions of the same story to be sure they can hear it and understand it and realize that why other piece of the research is important to their work and their work is important to get a third person in their part of their research. Yeah. And that happens in the outreach component as well as in the in reach part of it as well. So convincing other scientists that, you know, everything has value is also part of the challenge. So real quick in 30 seconds and tell me how do you train for this for the students? How do you have a student? What do you do to prepare yourself for this kind of career? Oh, right. So if this is something that's of interest, if you find yourself like networking with people and wanting to make those sort of sort of science connections better, a lot of writing. So getting your science communication writing better, writing blogs, kind of putting your thoughts together in terms of, you know, how you think about things. What is the sort of system level perspective on it? And by system level I mean how do things sort of link together, which is very different than the the individual data pieces that are part of your thesis. And then anytime you can find any training for leadership training, for medium facilitation, for any outreach or teaching, all of that kind of stuff will come into value for sure. Great. Well, thank you so much, Alicia. As always, I've learned a great deal from you. I do every time you come on the show. So I hope you enjoyed this one and I hope you'll come back next week for another episode of Likeable Science. I'm your host Ethan Allen, Alicia Jofwood-Jorrelson has been my guest today. Thank you, Alicia and Aloha. Thank you, Ethan.