citizen cyberscience

François Grey explained at Lift08 the profound implications of citizen cyberscience for the public understanding of science, and for scientists' understanding of the public. Two years after his talk, François sent us an update on his latest work.

Two years after appearing at Lift, my life has changed completely. I can’t blame that all on Lift, of course! I was about to move a few months later from gentrified Geneva to bustling Beijing, which is a life-changing event in itself. But in some sense giving that talk, to that sort of community, at that particular time, was a turning point for me.

Certainly, it was light years from the typical scientific meetings I go to. I mean, imagine an academic conference where scientists dance on stage during the break to psychedelic music – not likely! And besides being funky, it exposed me to a lot of young people doing really neat stuff on the Web. That was encouraging, because I was trying to get an embryonic project going myself.

So at the end of my talk, I announced the intention to start a Citizen Cyberscience Centre publicly for the first time. I knew I was sticking my neck out a bit, as the center had not been officially approved by the partners: CERN, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the University of Geneva. But I had no idea just how many complications we would face getting that approval, both due to management changes amongst the partners, and legal wrangling about the wording of the agreement.

And when the ink was dry on the agreement – which committed no one to spend a centime - we faced the next big challenge: funding! A year later, and after coming perilously close to throwing in the towel a couple of times, we’ve finally made it. I say we, because colleagues like Christian Pellegrini at UniGe and Ben Segal at CERN were enormously supportive the whole while. We now have projects with IBM and HP, and I’ve been awarded a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship to develop the Citizen Cyberscience Centre further.

So two years later – two and a half, really – we’re about to have our first really big international event, a Citizen Cyberscience Summit, hosted at King’s College London on 2-3 September. It won’t be as funky as Lift, but it will still be cool. Scientists talking with citizens, rather than with each other. Whoa, risky! Who knows, maybe someone will even start dancing on stage? In any case, it is in some sense a godchild of Lift, so thanks to all you Lifters for encouraging that dream to fruition!

Learn more on the Summit here!