How should you engage?¶
There are many different methods for engagement in data science and AI. If you recall the discussion from chapter 1, these range from the one-sided processes of 'informing' to the more empowering types of engagement that strengthen the capabilities of the public and enable them to participate in and contribute to more diverse forms of science and technology.
The following table summarises a wide range of salient methods:
| Mode of Engagement | Description | Degree of Engagement | Practical Strengths | Practical Weaknesses |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Newsletters (email) | Regular emails (e.g.: fortnightly or monthly) that contain updates, relevant news, and calls to action in an inviting format. | INFORM |
Can reach many people; can contain large amount of relevant information; can be made accessible and visually engaging. | Might not reach certain portions of the population; can be demanding to design and produce with some periodicity; easily forwarded to spam/junk folders without project team knowing (leading to overinflated readership stats). |
| Letters (post) | Regular letters (e.g.: monthly) that contain the latest updates, relevant news and calls to action. | INFORM |
Can reach parts of the population with no internet or digital access; can contain large amount of relevant information; can be made accessible and visually engaging. | Might not engage certain portions of the population; Slow delivery and interaction times hampers the effective flow of information and the organisation of further engagement. |
| App notifications | Projects can rely on the design of apps that are pitched to stakeholders who are notified on their phone with relevant updates. | INFORM |
Easy and cost-effective to distribute information to large numbers of people; Rapid information flows bolster the provision of relevant and timely news and updates. | More significant initial investment in developing an app; will not be available to people without smartphones. |
| Community fora | Events in which panels of experts share their knowledge on issues and then stakeholders can ask questions. | INFORM |
Can inform people with more relevant information by providing them with the opportunity to ask questions; brings community together in a shared space of public communication. | More time-consuming and resource intensive to organise; might attract smaller numbers of people and self-selecting groups rather than representative subsets of the population; effectiveness is constrained by forum capacity. |
| Online Surveys | Survey sent via email, embedded in a website, shared via social media, etc. | CONSULT |
Cost-effective; simple mass- distribution. | Risk of pre-emptive evaluative framework when designing questions; Does not reach those without internet connection or computer/smartphone access. |
| Phone Interviews | Structured or semi-structured interviews held over the phone. | CONSULT PARTNER |
Opportunity for stakeholders to voice concerns more openly. | Risk of pre-emptive evaluative framework when designing questions; Might exclude portions of the populations without phone access or with habits of infrequent phone use. |
| Door-to-door interviews | Structured or semi-structured interviews held in-person at people’s houses. | CONSULT PARTNER |
Opportunity for stakeholders to voice concerns more openly; can allow participants the opportunity to form connections through empathy and face-to- face communication. | Potential for limited interest to engage with interviewers; time-consuming; can be seen by interviewees as intrusive or burdensome. |
| :fontawesome-solid-people-arrows-left-right: In-person interviews | Short interviews conducted in- person in public spaces. | CONSULT PARTNER |
Can reach many people and a representative subset of the population if stakeholders are appropriately defined and sortition is used. | Less targeted; pertinent stakeholders must be identified by area; little time/interest to engage with interviewer; can be viewed by interviewees as time- consuming and burdensome. |
| Focus Groups | A group of stakeholders brought together and asked their opinions on a particular issue. Can be more or less formally structured. | CONSULT PARTNER |
Can gather in-depth information; Can lead to new insights and directions that were not anticipated by the project team. | Subject to hazards of group think or peer pressure; complex to facilitate; can be steered by dynamics of differential power among participants. |
| Online Workshops | Workshops using digital tools such as collaborative platforms. | CONSULT |
Opportunity to reach stakeholders across regions, increased accessibility depending on digital access. | Potential barriers to accessing tools required for participation, potential for disengagement. |
| Crowdsourcing (Online) | Well-designed tasks that can be undertaken by a distributed collective, with individuals working on separate components. | CONSULT PARTNER |
Opportunity to engage stakeholders across regions, in an asynchronous manner, with increased accessibility depending on digital access. Supports increased potential for diverse forms of expertise and experience. | Can be misused as a method for outsourcing cheap labour; potential barriers to accessing tools required for participation; potential for disengagement; difficult to ensure accuracy and validity of input from participants. |
| Distributed Project Collaboration (Online) | Online digital platforms, such as GitHub, enable new forms of citizen science and collaborative development on diverse projects (e.g., open source software, open science). | CONSULT PARTNER EMPOWER |
Opportunity to engage stakeholders across regions, in an asynchronous manner, with increased accessibility depending on digital access; increased potential for diverse forms of expertise and experience; empowers new communities to actively participate in shaping and building tools that have real value for their communities. | Potential barriers to accessing digital tools required for participation, including high levels of digital literacy. |
| Citizen panel or assembly | Large groups of people (dozens or even thousands) who are representative of a town/region. | INFORM CONSULT PARTNER EMPOWER |
Provides an opportunity for co-production of outputs; can produce insights and directions that were not anticipated by the project team; can provide an information base for conducting further outreach (surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.); can be broadly representative; can bolster a community’s sense of democratic agency and solidarity. | Participant rolls must be continuously updated to ensure panels or assemblies remains representative of the population throughout their lifespan; resource-intensive for establishment and maintenance; subject to hazards of group think or peer pressure; complex to facilitate; can be steered by dynamics of differential power among participants. |
| Citizen jury | A small group of people (between 12 and 24), representative of the demographics of a given area, come together to deliberate on an issue (generally one clearly framed set of questions), over the period of 2 to 7 days (Involve.org.uk. | INFORM CONSULT PARTNER EMPOWER |
Can gather in-depth information; can produce insights and directions that were not anticipated by the project team; can bolster participants’ sense of democratic agency and solidarity. | Subject to hazards of group think; complex to facilitate; risk of pre-emptive evaluative framework; small sample of citizens involved risks low representativeness of wider range of public opinions and beliefs. |
As with all forms of engagement, deciding on the best method requires awareness of your audience. Consider the following cases:
A research team has released results from an economics study that could have a positive impact on public policy. They decide to share these results with policymakers. The goal is to directly influence policy. Therefore, the results need to be clearly communicated and also connected to the policy goal. This connection is important to help ensure that policy-makers are able to evaluate the wider implications of the scientific findings.
Communication Goal: to demonstrate how scientific findings can support evidence-based policy impact
As part of an education outreach campaign to improve digital literacy among adolescents, a mental health charity are running workshops with secondary school students. They wish to communicate recent evidence about the impact of over-using social media on mental health. Rather than communicating complicated statistical information about the methods used in their study, the team develop a more accessible form of their findings and link these findings to practical steps that the students can take to protect themselves online.
Communication Goal: to build awareness of possible risks associated with excessive social media usage and support behavioural change strategies
A PhD student working in a Physics department has results from a recent study that developed and tested a new method for the large-scale data mining of astronomical data. The PhD student wish to present this new method and the validation study at an upcoming international conference for data science. The audience will be technically literate, but will not have specialist expertise in astronomy. Therefore, the PhD student describes the method in the context of its original study buy also emphasises the generalisability for other sciences (e.g. genomics).
Communication Goal: to advance academic career by gaining experience of presenting conference papers and also generating interest in a novel data science method
A common need with all of the above cases is the tailoring of the communication strategy to the engagement goal. And, in all cases, a clear message is vital. This topic (and others) will be the focus of the next section.
Education and Outreach: Getting Creative¶
The table at the start of this section outlines several methods for informing, but these are not the only ones that are relevant in the context of science and technology education and outreach.
Other examples include,
Education and Outreach
- Websites and social media
- Presentations
- Posters and displays
- Exhibitions
- Theatre, Film, and Documentaries
- Festivals
And, some forms of education and outreach can be very creative. Consider the following two examples:
"An unknown pathogen ravages Scotland’s capital, turning the unlucky souls into bloodthirsty ambling beasts. You are one of the last uninfected citizens in a city under martial law, cut off from the rest of the UK. Now, with help from real scientists, you have only hours to decide how to save Edinburgh, and perhaps the world. The Enlightenment Café: Deadinburgh, produced by LAStheatre, introduces the audience to the worlds of epidemiology and biomedical science through a night of immersive theatre. In a theatrical world, with actors playing the infected hordes and besieged soldiers, the audience meet genuine scientists using real science to solve a fictitious disease. In the end the audience must decide whether to destroy the city, cull the infected, or search for a cure; the fate of the city is in their hands. Through the outbreak of a zombie epidemic Deadinburgh asks ‘what does it really mean to be human’ whilst offering parallels with real life science and procedures for managing disease outbreaks."
From the National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement
Billennium was a mobile augmented reality (AR) project that took place in Bristol, UK in 2018. Participants used mobile devices to be guided on an AR tour, not of their city in the present day, but of possible architectural futures. The tour was designed to help promote members of the public engage in discussion and futures thinking about how their city could be design together.