 My job here is just to say a word of introduction and then I hope to lightly moderate questions from you to our guest. I am very pleased to welcome her here to the Berkman Klein Center. The question of my interest is this. She was a principal architect of a remarkable event which I will describe to you. Its quality of virality, its integration of persons across lines of difference, totally remarkable. Its focus, its organization, it was all in a sense a product of the net. My question, having pulled off such a magnificent thing, how do you take it forward? What is your thought in taking it forward? How do you turn it from the event to real consequence? I give you Caroline Weinberg. The question that I've been asking myself for the last six months. So, I'm Caroline. I was one of the co-chairs and lead organizers of the March for Science, which many of you probably know, but it was a movement to advocate for science and society and policy. And so usually my speeches about this revolve around aspiration, like your voice matters and you can do amazing things. Or I berate the scientific community for not having done enough to protect our present and future in policy. But, given where we are, I'm going to shift and talk about how the internet was involved in the planning of the March and what we're hoping we can get out of it forward. So, the March, so I, the names of the people who are most associated with the March are mostly people who organized the Washington D.C. March. So, myself and Jonathan Berman and Valerie Aquino, who were two of the other co-chairs. But it's, we get, I guess, too much credit for the March for Science because it really was a global movement with no defined founder. It was Staples. It was founded by thousands of people around the world in 600 cities. It took a couple of hours before it went viral and it was just everywhere with, in the first five days, there were 40,000 people who volunteered to help us organize it. There were people organizing it all over the world and several organizations that reached out wanting to get on board. We actually had so many events when it first started that we missed a lot of really important ones and looking back on it. We were like, oh God, we wish you had been more organized. But all of those people were involved in founding the movement. So, I could give a long kind of Oscar style speech right now with all the names of the people who were involved, but from creating the mission to partnerships to Facebook moderation to satellite coordination, but it really is just thousands of people who were involved in this. It was really remarkable and by the time we all gathered in Washington D.C. on April 21st, the march was on April 22nd, most of us in Washington D.C. had never met each other, so we all kind of set up shop in a wee work and people would kind of trickle in coming in and we would just look up from our computers and say, hey, what's up, and then just go back down to our work because there was, and then we would be typing to one another even though we were in the same room. Because we just got so used to communicating on the internet. I mean, this entire movement was created on Slack and now, and Facebook and Twitter, that was the way that everything happened. So, it's actually hard when you think about the way that it arose to kind of wrap your mind around the way that march has happened before the internet existed, like an idea would spark a meeting and then people would have a conversation around it and it would spread by phone and by letter and kind of from friend to friend, but the way it happened with us was it went viral on Twitter and then, you know, in the blink of an eye, we had 800,000 Facebook followers and any time you wanted anything to happen, you would just blast it out to those people and it really is it's just a remarkable way to be able to do things, to build a community of advocates around the world to learn about the issues that are important to them and to find out the ways to make themselves heard. So, there were good and bad things about doing this on the internet. One good thing is that it provides instant feedback. So, some of the most painful moments around the march for science happened on the internet. When we were getting, when we were being called out on mistakes, particularly around things like diversity inclusion in the march and social justice both within the march and within the scientific community itself. And these things were constantly coming up and this real-time criticism forced us to confront our mistakes and address the wrongdoings. But it was a very surreal experience for most of us who had definitely never had to confront these issues on such a large scale. But it also makes you defensive in a way. I don't know if any of you have ever had the experience of having thousands of people yell at you on Twitter, but it's not fun. And even though you do learn a lot from it, it makes you defensive, especially when you've done things to correct it and they keep coming up and you kind of want to shout, like, I promise we did something about this, but it's, you know, you have trouble walking it back. So, that's a good part, the organizing part and the getting real-time feedback that help you be better. But there's also, the Internet is also a terrible place that lives forever and kind of once a misconception or falsehood gets out there it's just going to follow you forever. A lot of cases they were just kind of demonstrably false, like rumors that controversial scientists were on our board when they weren't. You could go to our website and misprove this, but science reporters who theoretically consider themselves advocates of evidence just kind of never did that research and once those things are out there it's hard to get it back. And in other cases as scientists a lot of us were used to kind of you take a long haul plan of, you take months to set something up and then launch it into the world, which is not how it works when something goes viral on the Internet. And so we were in a lot of times waiting for the plans and language to be perfectly crystallized before we announced them and that's how kind of a start and misconceptions would get going. Which I feel like is the tension that was at the root of a lot of the issues that we faced where kind of the nature of how a march grows on social media is that people want immediate details. They want to know what's happening and they can ask you those questions immediately. And it's hard to communicate the reality of what's happening when you are working to create this global event over time. And so we were working so hard to make things work smoothly that it couldn't be instantaneous but people wanted immediate feedback. And it turns out that trust me it's coming is not an effective way of dealing with criticism. So we were constantly dealing with that issue. And these things aren't unique to the march for science or social movements in general. They are happening all over the Internet around everything. And it's the Internet is a great way to communicate research and findings and get these movements going. But it's also invites snap judgments that are hard to reverse and creates just this lightning fast spread of misinformation that is impossible to get back. Actually, well, I just learned it's an anomaly but how many of you know that thing about the pillow with the feathers in the wind? No one? Okay there's this old idiom where a guy spreads a lot of rumors and the person who is telling him that he basically shouldn't be such a gossip says go and get a pillow and cut it open and all the feathers go out in the wind. And the man who was criticizing him says you know go and get back all the feathers and the guy who spreads all the rumors says you know I can't get them all they went off the wind they're all over the place and he said that's like a rumor once it's out there you can't pull it back. So that was kind of how it was like on the Internet. And that's just kind of something you have to accept that once things are getting out there you won't be able to pull them back. So knowing that you have to think about the ways that the Internet you just have to accept the negatives and think about the ways that it can be channeled for good. And so there's two ways that kind of I've thought of as we come along thinking about these things. The first is that we have to get science and science advocates people who are committed to evidence-based policy to speak for the evidence. The concept that the evidence will speak for itself is not actually accurate and we need to be doing that. There's this idea that the last stop in scientific inquiry is getting published in a scientific journal but that can't actually be true. Communicating it to the public and having people understand it needs to be the last stop and we have this internet this opportunity with the Internet to kind of reach out from behind the ivory towers and not just talk about science in the scientific conferences and in journals we can actually have these conversations in public and the scientific community as a whole is just kind of blowing it so to speak and we're doing that and we're missing that follow through of getting the science to the people who need it most and we need to be thoughtful about it. You can't just throw out information in a lot of ways a boring scientist giving a talk is just as hurtful to kind of science advocacy as misinformation because no one wants to listen to it and people discount it so scientists need to better be ambassadors in their communities but we also need the skills to do it so if that's having someone teach you a 10 page journal article into like a couple of 140 character tweets that's something that needs to happen and we need to take better advantage of the ways that we can communicate on the internet and make sure that that's effectively done or it just went up from 140 right it's like 280 characters yes. So scientists just need to evolve with the public we need to understand how to communicate better and we need the people who have those skills to help us do it and the second part of it is digital advocacy which I'm actually curious people's perspective on because it's relatively new and like a lot of other social movements the March for Science uses digital tools to amplify our advocacy efforts so mostly social media and emails but there are other ways around that we can with a couple of clicks create letter writing campaigns and petitions we can use resources to make it easier for people to find their representatives and call them we can do all of these things we can disseminate guides advocacy so that people better understand the issues but the problem that we have is that as we talk about how to transition from this march to a movement is that the day of the march day of most marches is incredibly powerful it's a hugely passionate day people are all out together kind of cheering for the same thing and carrying their awesome signs and having this amazing day and then you go home and it's kind of like what's next and you have this transition period trying to figure out what those steps are and the real challenge is how to get people not to become complacent not oh I signed a letter last month or to only advocate when there's a crisis going on and not have it be a year round thing I called my representative last time something terrible was happening in the world like I don't have time to do this I'm doing something else and it's and I that happens to me as well I mean I've you know has not as I regularly contact representatives although I should be the so it's figuring out how to do that how to get digital advocacy and make people feel that passion so that there's constant change and people are constantly involved is the real question how to continue that how to sustain that motivation from that one powerful day into something people want to be constantly advocating for in the digital space which is the most effective way to reach people so how do we create a Facebook post or a series of tweets or the emails or you know articles or whatever it is to make people get involved on that level and way above my intellectual pay grade so I was curious kind of what what people think about about the best way to do that and how the channel will be in person passion into something that translates into kind of the digital world and that's it well yeah I figured they know what they're talking about and I don't yeah hi thank you for what you've been doing so my name is Steven I'm a law student here I have a background in environmental science and a friend of mine Eric and I started this organization where we've been experimenting with science communication and music festivals in California because a lot of people there are a spouse that they love science love evidence but then simultaneously they believe the earth is flat and that crystals heal people so what we've found is actually quite useful is that we'll take scientific concepts that are kind of easy to understand and systems science is often the avenue that we've taken with this and we'll chop up YouTube videos very quickly so it's like rapid fire media that people can see the visualization so they can get the complex concepts quite easily and we're starting to get a lot of headway with it and a lot of people are like wow this is amazing I'm so engaged and we've been having kind of the same problem like how do you do it digitally but I feel like if you can make have a scientist talk over something they don't necessarily have to be you know physics professors and usually the best vocal advocate but if you can have them practice and then have like a video running I found that to be like in a very effective way to get people engaged using digital media and it's been very helpful in doing it over the internet and in person. Hi I'm Leslie I just got out of Dartmouth and I'm going to a programming bootcamp for mostly Latina students but they're also some African American students there and so we're sort of facing the same issue how do we get involved in you know ideas larger than ourselves and I am constantly thinking you know as I hear about their families I think of Maslow's hierarchy and that you know many people are sort of worried about the issues right in front of their faces in terms of their immediate survival I'm at least the people that I know so so maybe somehow to me I think okay how do we make this relevant to sort of the smaller concerns that people have in their daily lives. One of the things that we're working on is that there's like the big science issues you know that a lot of people care about the environment which is super important climate change funding for health care clean energy there are these things that a lot of people talk about that are really kind of commonly in discussion but what people don't necessarily often talk about is kind of the smaller things that people feel really passionate about and finding a way to to empower people to advocate for that you know if we send out a national email or someone's running a program where they're thinking of it on a larger scale they're going to target the big issues that most people will get behind but like one of the things we're working on is is these one pagers to help people advocate for science better on the issues that matter to them and we sent out emails to we have more than 270 partners who are really involved in the scientific community or you know are the scientific community and they we reached out to them about the big topics but a lot of them wrote in with these kind of small issues that we wouldn't like vector-borne diseases which is not something that most people think of kind of empowering people to advocate for but is incredibly important in a lot of communities and so that to me is like a part of it is figuring out how to find what people are passionate about and not just kind of like shove your passion on them I guess if that makes sense two things the MIT energy hackathon is happening this weekend Friday through Sunday and there's going to be a challenge on what do you do in the wake of the hurricanes all right so how do you rebuild the infrastructure I know that's happening because I proposed the challenge and they accepted it and I would like to see that go viral I would like to see the weekend become a global brainstorming on this particular issue because I think the technology is mature enough and practical and affordable enough now that we can actually get together as a group either there or online and provide a vision of a possible future that can affect the people on Barbuda the American and British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico so that's one thing so the idea of having a practical project that people can work together may make some things happen what I do is every week I publish a listing of energy and other events things that are happening in the Cambridge area events like this things that are happening in the community things that are happening at other colleges and universities I've been doing that for eight years and I thought that the climate change community because a lot of the stuff that I publish is about climate change would be interested in that right it turns out that they're not going to get mothers out front I can't get 350 masks I can't get the main line environmental institutions to recognize that there's an opportunity here to affect policy because major policy people come through Harvard MIT BU so forth and so on and you can ask them questions and to learn what the science is across the silos and compare notes and if they did that for a semester or a year and pulled that information they would know more than the experts with a wider a wider sense of the knowledge wider perspective Cambridge Boston about 60 colleges and universities you could do that in every major city right it's a quarter time job for me to put that out but I found that it's really difficult to get over that spark gap of looking to information right as political right so this is some of the things that I see yeah I mean it's in terms of making things go viral I wish I had a better answer for you I would have liked nothing more than for the march to go viral immediately so that we could have had some things in place first you should reach out because so part of it is specifically target like you were saying kind of specific chapters for different organizations and finding out how to kind of get into that specifically I learned the term over the course of the march influencer which I had never heard before but I wasn't really involved in social media before this happened and so it's getting people who have a following really to support it I feel like it's the best way forward in that but I mean it is a constant challenge is figuring out how to get people to it's frustrating right because you come up with this amazing idea and you're like oh great everyone will be behind this and then no one is and then you have some silly idea and people are like oh this is great let's put it everywhere wait so it's I mean figuring out how to do that is I guess one of the is would be the third step in how to channel the internet on things like this thank you for organizing the march I participated here in Boston it was a wonderful thing I guess I'm about to assign homework if you're not familiar with the work of Zaynep Tufeki you should read her latest book Twitter and tear gas the power and fragility of network protests read it tonight it talks exactly to your point I also think she's a Berkman Klein fellow so if somebody could connect you to that would be wonderful her she's a long time activist and protestor herself as well as a sociologist at University of North Carolina and she compares the modern state of protests the one you describe to for example the Civil Rights March on Washington Martin Luther King's March which took a decade to mobilize it wasn't just folks calling each other up and getting them to Washington they were dealing with an extremely hostile environment where they really had to get hundreds of thousands of people into Washington and out at night time by night time so nobody would die and when you're organizing something like that you build all sorts of capacities you build relationships you build organizations you build a network of people who are working long term to do things which you then can apply in different ways it wasn't so much the March on Washington that sparked the Civil Rights legislation it was the fact that there were organizations built by it who were going to affect elections I mean that if I were to offer you advice it would be think about capacity building what do you want people to do more than just sign a letter what are your goals who do you want to defeat in the next election something really tangible that brings about change because everybody is for science many people are for science there are millions of people out on the street for science but what's your theory of change how do you actually expect support for science to change the world that's a heavy question so I think that what you're saying about the need to build capacity and have things keep going is why starting in the March on fire I think on January 24th and already in February we were thinking about what the next steps were and part of it was because we had managed to channel this incredible passion and we wanted to make sure it kept going and part of it was we were working so hard that we were like this cannot possibly end on April 22nd we have to have something going forward to show for it and what the key I think is going to I should say that very clearly is to empower local leaders is to create a way to make sure that there are strong organizations all over the country and the world that carry that torch and that continue doing it there and it's about there's only so much you can do from a national platform really we can come up with big campaigns that target issues that everyone can contact but the real change is going to happen locally and what we're going to do is go forward up to the president needs to be a focus of attention and so empowering local leaders which is something that having individual chapters of things is really what the most powerful way to do that and a lot of the satellites that were involved in the March are continuing on with these thriving organizations some of them are staying as the March for Science some March for Science kind of branded others are doing completely different things but all are powerful and so making sure to to build that local strength and to empower local leaders is really I think the best way to keep things going so that it's not just beholden to a central organization but it's really empowering everyone. Does that make sense? Hi, my name is Ryan. Over here. Hi, sorry. I'm currently a law student here at Harvard but before I came here I had a very heavy background in the life sciences and looking back in retrospect on my formal educational training there was a really distinct lack of training to be an effective communicator. There's lots of very heavy detail. I know the biosynthetic pathways to proline but how do I describe it? You know as it is to a person who hasn't had a biology course in 20 years. So I was wondering if you could comment on what kinds of curriculum changes you think would be very valuable to people at the undergraduate and graduate level and how do we convince these higher education institutions to enact some of these. So that's actually something I spend a lot of time thinking about. It's really important because people don't scientists if I'm sure that many of you have probably had a conversation with a scientist before who just kind of like runs talking about their research and you have no idea what they're talking about and they haven't really noticed the blank look on your face because they're so focused on what they're saying and figuring out how to confront that is kind of part and parcel with how to make a stronger scientific community that communicates with the public better. So personally I think it starts with, it starts at the undergrad level and the graduate school level where I think it should be absolutely mandatory that there be science communication classes as part of that. If you can't break your research down to a way that makes sense to someone with who is taken like only a high school bio class then you need to go back and kind of get to know your research better in a way that it can be communicated because what's really like what's the point of it if it's not accessible to the general public your research needs to be accessible to everyone. So I think science communication classes need to be a standard. How to I was going to say force but encourage universities and colleges to have that be part of it is a challenge and it's something that I'm hoping can kind of be peer pressured into doing and just making clear that it just should be something they do. I think that it should be part of scientific conferences so should talking about how to get yourself involved in policy. These things all just need to become the norm and in terms of what to do with people who are already scientists part of it is continuing education taking those classes but there's a lot of resources out there for scientific communication to try to get people on board with it but a lot of it is either dated so it doesn't talk about ways to communicate on social media or to kind of be more accessible to people in different platforms and a lot of it is too polite I guess in a way. I mean so scientists often when they are giving a talk they'll start with the first like four minutes of who they are and what their research is and where they went to undergrad and where they went to graduate school and where they're a fellow and they'll just go on and on and on and there needs to be a guide where someone's like literally no one cares. Just get to what you're here to talk about. We need to find a way to be more up front with scientists about what people are interested in and have those conversations better. I think it starts with the undergrad but I think we shouldn't kind of disregard the fact that hopefully we can teach the older dogs new tricks I guess. But yeah I think that getting scientific communication to be a standard class is going to be one of the important steps. Hi my name is Dave and thank you for the work you're doing. A lot of thoughts about it as somebody who tries to do this in my community it's very frustrating. I'm thinking about climate change in particular and as you're talking about how to help scientists talk at conferences I feel like that's a different topic. Yes generally people need to be clear about what they're working on but climate change is sort of the big one and it's the one where there's so much misinformation out there and so little being done in our schools to educate people. Do you see that as really the overarching topic or is this really just let's advocate for science across many It really is going to depend on who you ask. Sorry? It really depends on who you ask. There's a yeah well no so for me personally the environment and climate change is super important. I tend to focus more on like public health initiatives because that's what my background is so I would be much more you know I know about climate change and the environment but not enough that I would give a talk on it but if someone wanted me to talk on you know the opioid crisis or clean needle exchange program. So I think what's great about the March for Science is that we have people with all these different perspectives who can speak to such different levels of it and so I mean a lot of people agree that climate change is the end and I'll be all of the conversations because it's obviously the one that has the largest scope and is really affecting the entire planet on every level but I really think that including public health. Well it does I mean that's climate change has a huge impact on everything from mental health because of trauma from the hurricanes to you know to asthma I mean it affects everything so I think it's it really is going to depend on who's kind of giving the talk Well to me if you're asking for opinions I think the overwatching issue is climate change that's the where the... You're not alone. That's where the cataclysms are going to come from. We just had news yesterday that just in 2016 global greenhouse gas concentrations went up 1.8% in a single year. They're accelerating. Nothing that we've done has slowed it or even steadied it. It's accelerating despite everything and it's terrible and nobody understands it and I mean nobody. The great percentage of people don't get it and they're fed torrents of misinformation and even you know in my town I wish I had a little toolkit where what do I bring to the school board to say what do you do and what are your science teachers empowered to even address this issue or do they feel scared which I think a lot of them do. I mean that's something we're working on yeah. People seem like they're not willing to even discuss it. It's kind of politicized and it's a huge problem and I don't see how I feel like we need to get as you said influencers maybe houses of worship, the NFL, things that people do sort of buy into. We're saying the same things but if it's just the March for Science saying it you're not going to reach any of these people. The other thing is that people get bored of hearing the same thing over and over again it's really easy to tune things out. So people have been have been talking about climate change for a really long time and not getting traction anymore. So coming at it from a new angle is I think important. So it is about going to... it's important to talk about the way that there's emissions from buses and bus depots which affects climate change because there's too many cars and too many buses. But you can also talk about it how having those things create dramatically increases the rates of asthma in kids and so you can talk about climate change but take it from a different angle and re-engage people in it that way but keeping talking about greenhouse gases and holding the ozone layer and temperature rising and polar bears being hungry like nope everyone's tuning that out now. So we need to find a new way to be having those conversations and part of it is doing things like creating toolkits like if this is what's important to you here's how you should advocate for it. So figuring out those new approaches needs to be key to dealing with them. I just want to mention this point of information that there's a very important article that's just come out in the Lancet about present day environmental impact on health. So we should all read it, we should all know it, we should all find a way of communicating it to non-scientists. And I just wanted to mention one other thing because it's not come up in this discussion I think it's important that if you want to talk about how to end the world apocalyptically and dramatically and soon don't forget nuclear war. I'm trying to but no you can't really. Sorry, hi. So I'm also a law student in my former life I was a cancer biologist. So I'm a cancer biologist. So I'm trying to I was a cancer biologist. So it's really great to have you here. But I'm curious I think a couple of people have touched on this but I'm curious if you have any ideas about not just influencing local members of the school board but actually training and helping people with science backgrounds run for office. You know here at the law school we have a couple of programs, classes that in theory I think train you to do policy work or run for local type elections or run for office but it seems like one of the ways to potentially change the dialogue would be to actually get people into those offices who already have that background so I guess this is sort of a follow up to Ryan's question. So there's a lot of organizations that do that really well that just have really amazing programs in place to do things like that. I think that personally personally not speaking for the March for Science but me as an individual I think that we should focus more on people who not necessarily on scientists but on people who embrace science and are willing to listen to experts as they do it. Because by default saying that we should promote scientists and policy which is not what I'm saying you were saying but a lot of people do say that like the key is going to be to get scientists to run for for to be politicians. That's not the necessary step to me it is getting people in office who will listen to those experts because not all scientists are going to be good politicians and they're all going to be harder to find but making sure that we find people who will listen to those experts and incorporate it I feel like is as important a step as getting scientists involved themselves. May I ask a question? Sure. In its way is like the science community in the sense that it stays out of politics it considers its security actually to rest and its credibility to rest on staying out of politics and certainly that's a value that's held very high by science as well so this interface that you're exploring in its way seems very dangerous and yet you were able to ignite this phenomenon not only nothing you ignited it but you saw this phenomenon ignite where science came out and did something that was clearly political and now you're in the position of carrying that forward are you not up against a huge inbuilt opposition at the core of science thinking that says no you're popularizing what we do you're not serious about science you're trying to explain it to people as opposed to do it and that's not something that we should be teaching as the fundamental lessons of science what do you say to that? We got that a lot especially when it first went when the march first went viral scientists shouldn't be political and we shouldn't get involved in it and it was really maddening because for many reasons I mean the truth is that a lot of people while it was the march was undeniably motivated by more recent political changes that maybe got a little more dramatic anti-science policies have been around for a while and the scientific community as a whole should be and I speak as a member of the scientific community should be like embarrassed that we didn't mobilize earlier because science is political science informs policy it needs to be involved in that and as scientists we need to take that role in making sure that it is and science is non-partisan that's the reason that studies are designed the way they are to try to reduce bias and by allowing people to make it a partisan issue to say we shouldn't be political we should stay out of it we're not helping the world we're doing a really terrible job of getting involved and having our research matter and the academic community is like that too they think they'll lose credit and people won't pay attention to them and they'll make people think less of the field as a whole but I mean not to use our tagline but it is like the science not silencing like eventually you reach to a point where you can't in good conscience remain silent about things anymore and we've more than reached that point and so I feel that and the scientific community really rose to the occasion I mean we had almost every major scientific society in the country and a lot of them in the world get on board and involved because they all realize that we had reached a point where they couldn't stay out of it anymore and I'm hoping that that creates a tide shift that continues which is why he's not here anymore but which is why things like science communication and teaching about policy are both important because those need to become a fundamental issue. Thank you Oh I'm not calling on people I'll just follow up with the question just address impact and I think I'm curious what it is if you could talk a little bit more about what you wanted to accomplish setting forth and if you feel like you accomplished what you set out to accomplish was the impact more in the realm of getting scientists to think more about public discourse was it in the realm of asking the public to participate more in policy with guidance as a basis or in some other set of connections We had a lot of goals so I think you separate it right so there's the day of the march where the goal is to send a strong message that people are willing to advocate for science and policy and having a lot of people turn out around the world was a very effective way of doing that but then there's the the kind of actual impact of it and that has to do with with getting and keeping scientists involved in policy making sure that they continue to be more vocal about what they're doing and that's something we're continuing to work towards and that has to do with things like making sure that it becomes a standard part of scientific conferences and scientific classes that you are involved in things like that and getting the public to greater engage in science and with scientists and advocacy is kind of the end all be all because that's what leads to lasting change you know if you empower people with the knowledge that they need to become better advocates and that has to do with getting the scientific community to talk more to the public that has the ripple effect of creating change in policy and so we need to work towards that I think and I don't think it's possible to say at this point in time whether we've accomplished our goals I mean I want to say like yes awesome everything great but it's the real test of how not just the march for science but how all of the marches and movements that have been happening for the last couple of years and earlier than that too obviously and more recently what is the impact of them a year later what are people able to see you know it's a long haul study rather than short impact I guess but yeah I mean hopefully we'll have more as we get in a year Hi, my question ties in both with Matthew's and with Charlie's so in science there's often a stigma against speaking to or sharing your research with the general public rather than say publishing in a scientific journal and scientists who spend a lot of time trying to communicate their science to the general public are not necessarily looked upon by the rest of the scientific community in a very favorable light how what kind of mechanisms do you think could help change that from and where do you think it is self marketing and getting attention versus in a good way versus in a way that maybe is distracting to their scientific goals and how do you balance that and then how do you bring that in to training programs or into conferences or even into grants like I know that for an NSF graduate fellowship you need to write a section about public service and so how can you build some of that into the curriculum and into programs in a way that is not going to be respected by the scientific community I hate that part of the scientific community honestly like the idea that scientific communicators should be looked down on some way because they don't they don't take their work seriously is horrible it's the idea that being able to communicate your science should be one of the most lauded and important things that you can be as a scientist because that's what makes your research matter how do you balance the amount of time that you spend say when you're responding to blog posts or talking to journalists with the amount of time that you spend doing your science so I mean don't spend all of your time doing doing either I guess it's going to depend right because there are some scientists who will become like professional scientific communicators and that's great and there are some people who will spend most of their time in the lab and be and communicate some of it or a kind of a standard of practice that scientists who don't necessarily have time to do the scientific communication aren't interested in it because some people just no matter what you teach them are not going to be good at that they have like a scientific communicator buddy who they tell about their work and that person communicates it and and I think that that's part of it is A getting the scientific community to recognize the fact that your research has the most value when it's communicated to the public and that there's this concept of like that you're dumbing down things by breaking them down to their most basic parts but in reality that's like the one of the most important things we can do is making sure that it's accessible to everyone and I fully forgot what my number two was but I do think that finding a way to make sure that the scientific community embraces that I don't know how the scientific community is slow to change but it's something worth working on and I think that as the younger generation of giant of scientists that grew up with social media as kind of a standard thing that that hopefully will shift a little bit and that there's this I can't remember if it was IBM there was a a series of commercials where it's about like turning scientists into rock stars like the equivalent of we should celebrate them the way that we celebrate like athletes and stuff what there's a lot of people to celebrate in science and so having that kind of effect where people look at scientists as kind of the heroes that they are hopefully will also make people more inclined to everyone likes everyone likes to be applauded every once in a while so hopefully we can create that yeah hello my name is Chabong I'm a postdoc at Harvard the government department here and I'm working for civic education project and my question is pretty simple relating to your social organizing experience social movement organizing experience so I'm more curious about kind of the going viral moment in your movement so and actually in the digital realm it's really hard to reach a threshold for our voice to be heard so my kind of sort of theory is Twitter or social media is a source of efficacy but at the same time lately it's source of inefficacy because sometimes it's really hard to reach the threshold and I know you've mentioned a little bit or a lot about those kind of issues there was a moment but could you tell me a little bit more about a few breakthrough moments or tipping points in which you finally got a sudden increase of public attention you sort of gained attraction in a public arena yes so I guess so the first one is when it initially went viral on Twitter which I should know the exact name of the person who made that happen but there were several conversations happening around it and then someone with a lot of followers retweeted a tweet about it and it just all of a sudden took off it was unreal and it just jumped to like from 50 to 30,000 followers in a couple of hours it was amazing and also terrifying so that was the first moment when we kind of jumped to people knowing who we are and then what followed after that was articles coming out some good some bad and getting it more kind of mainstream not everyone's on social media so that's what brought it to a wider community and then there were other small things that brought it up but I would say the other big jumps that we had that legitimized us in a lot of ways in the scientific community which made a huge difference in the response to us was when we would get big organizations to sign on so when AAAS and which is one of the largest scientific societies in the country or world Research America and AGU which are very large and well respected societies when they signed on we really had to kind of coax a lot of these we had to have very serious conversations with these societies about how we were going to stay nonpartisan and what our focus was and what we wanted to do and it took a while to to make that happen and then as soon as those societies announced people were like coming out of the woodwork they're like how do we sign up it was as though the larger places had done their due diligence and people were ready to sign on and then so that was a huge jump in people in people being involved and then that's what happened with every new area that we broke into so the getting our first museum was a big deal because then like a lot of museums and zoos came on getting an aquarium was a big deal getting a university was a big deal our first teachers associations every time we broke through a new barrier other people would would kind of join the cause from that area and that's how we built this really enormous interdisciplinary coalition where it was you know the National Farmers Union with the American Society of Cell Biology with the National Science Teachers Association I mean all of these people who wouldn't usually be sitting in the same room talking about science sitting in the same room and talking about science and so that really was the was what kept us breaking through is yeah Do you have everyone's email addresses? Everyone who was involved in the march I wish you've assembled this huge audience do you have a way of of pushing out to them or is it just a matter of whether they look at Twitter or they look at this? So we have you know 800,000 Facebook followers in a secret group I don't know why it's called a secret group it's definitely not secret and then a 300 or 400,000 in a larger one I should note these numbers off the top of my head and then a Twitter account so there's social media where we pushed up off and then we have we have an email list of 250,000 people or something along those lines and the satellites all have their own email lists that they push their push either local or national campaigns to and we're constantly building that as you run letter writing campaigns and petitions and stuff you collect more emails of people getting involved but what really creates the bigger impact is the fact that our partners send out these initiatives to their lists so it's not just ours but it's other people's as well and that ripple effect is really what helps us communicate beyond social media Well may I just say thank you very much for coming. Thank you for having me.