User:OpenScientist/ESOF 2012/Shaping the public face of your discipline

About
''This page hosts a proposal for a scientific session at the Euroscience Open Forum 2012 that will take place in Dublin from 11-15 July, 2012. It was submitted on 30 June, 2011 and rejected in September. Call. ''

Title
Shaping the public face of your discipline

Programme
Scientific Programme

Theme
Science and Culture

Session format
Workshop

Abstract
The public perception of a field of research is an important, albeit indirect, determinant for public spending on it. We will look at some scenarios of non-specialists searching the Internet for scientific information, at the tools that are commonly used and on how the search results contribute to shaping the public face of an area of research. As a next step, the search results for some popular queries will be examined as to whether the corresponding content is user-generated and how it fares in the eyes of both specialists and non-specialists. Special emphasis will be placed on projects run by the Wikimedia Foundation (e.g. Wikipedia, Wikiversity, Wikispecies) and public wikis in general.

To ensure that the discussion is relevant to participants across fields, examples in the introductory part will mainly be drawn from topics related to Open Access. In the second part, session participants will collaborate to gather information on the web-public face of some audience-selected fields of research, and explore the extent to which they can help shape it.

Target audience
Researchers, research institutions, research funders, research communicators and other stakeholders in fields pertaining to scientific research.

Length of session
2h

Special needs and remarks
General remark: The session will be prepared on-wiki at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/User:OpenScientist/ESOF_2012/Shaping_the_public_face_of_your_discipline. IT requirements: stable LAN for the presenter, stable WLAN for the audience. Remote participation is encouraged.