forum.darkskydiscovery.org.uk

Will this be a good community event? The Edinburgh Beltane Beacon for Public Engagement is sponsoring this event to help trigger ideas for how to run successful community science events.

Members of the Beltane project will be coming along to take a look at the dark sky activities in Scotlandwell and this topic is here to help start the discussion between Beltane and Dark Skyers on the forum. Heather Rae, from the The Edinburgh Beltane project, says:

"We would like to share good practice in public and community engagement. In particular we'd like to build up some knowledge on how researchers can engage with people in their local communities, and why would they want to.

So my own take on this is that meeting the community on their "turf" is a means of engaging with people in their comfort zone and reaching people who would not be inclined to attend an event held in a University or even a museum. Interacting with people in different locations also means they may interact in a different way, perhaps letting their guard down and being more willing to contribute.

The Dark Sky Scotland project has an interesting model of initially training local people (teachers and amateur enthusiasts) as communicators/demonstrators and then running a community event later in the evening. It is a great example of leaving a legacy as presumably the trained demonstrators are able to repeat all or part of the events at another time. So a valuable means of increasing the impact of your public engagement work.

What are other people experiences of community engagement with research?"

We are really keen to have Beltane people and Dark Sky people at the event too (2pm-9pm). If you'd like to come along to the event itself please let me or Heather know. We're very grateful to the Portmoak Community Woodlands for hosting this event.

Dan

Just to say that we would be delighted to hear all view points: communicator, public, researcher and interested bods too!

Also the programme for our event is now available on our web blog: http://www.edinburghbeltane.net.

Heather

Some staff at the School of Informatics are interested in community robotics. As a test run for a grant application we visited Dumbiedukes community centre in Edinburgh with a couple of robot "canaries" which measure humidity/temperature/pollution. Six volunteers, users of the centre, took part in a workshop - on the understanding that is would be we who benefited ( finding out whether our robot was usable by and interesting to non-specialists).

I feel it's useful to test-run any ideas you have with real people first.

Contact Barbara Webb (bwebb@inf.ed.ac.uk) for more details about the project.

I - my main interest being public engagement - am keen to keep the relationship with the volunteers going.

Morna Findlay

Hi Morna,

The Community Robot program is intriguing. Using volunteers for a dry run or focus group is an excellent example of good practice in pubic engagement work in general. In my experience these sessions often highlight unforeseen benefits for all parties, as well as helping to improve the engagement session.

Something I would like to address in our session is the question of exactly what we mean by a local community and share ways in identifying, contacting and keeping in touch with these communities.

Heather