Friday and Saturday last week I had the privilege of attending the first Sage Congress. Hopefully this will be the first in a series of posts that cover that meeting because there is simply so much to think about and so much to just get on and do. This is not a post about public engagement work by scientists. It is not about going to schools and giving talks. It is not about engaging with the main stream media to present your work to the great unwashed. It is about engaging with the people who will be driving your research agenda within ten years, about how the way researchers connect with society will be changed over the next decade whether they like it or not. - Cameron Neylon

pq:"“The public” is not some homogeneous group of barbarians at the gate of our ivory towers." No no, of course not. It's a highly heterogeneous group of barbarians, and they long since over-ran the gates of the ivory towers. :-) (Obdisclaimer after that sort of comment: I agree with Cameron, that this is largely a good thing.) - Bill Hooker

This is a fantastic post. - Heather

You're right of course Bill. It's just that most academics continue to assume that they're the hired help... - Cameron Neylon

... when in fact it's we, the researchers, who are exactly that -- the hired help. I've said for years that science should be viewed as a service industry (even if it is really, really slow service). - Bill Hooker

Yup, slow and surly for the most part. I have to admit it's not always obvious how to go about doing this kind of thing effectively. But step one, find the right community. - Cameron Neylon

I think I've fixed it - though I'm not sure how, are you still seeing it? - Cameron Neylon

Ok, think it's fixed now - I've got some plugin incompatibility issues I need to work through obviously... - Cameron Neylon

Provocative title and I like the thinking - joergkurtwegner

Great post! I discovered this via Gilles Frydman's Twitter feed (@gfry) in my browsing around the web pages and Twitter feeds of participants at the Health 2.0 Conference this week. At the risk of mentioning kindred spirits you and/or your readers may already be aware of, Douglas Rushkoff gave a talk at SXSW earlier this year on <a href="http://rushkoff.com/2010...">Program or Be Programmed</a> and Tim O'Reilly recently wrote an essay on <a href="http://opengovernment.labs.oreilly.com/ch01...">Government as a Platform</a> (which invokes the metaphor of a vending machine to represent the prevalent view of government), both of which corroborate some of the ideas you espouse here. I'm glad to see this convergence of great thinking and hope it will help promote great actions ... i.e., I hope more of us will choose engagement over irrelevance! - Joe McCarthy

I like Gilles post at http://e-patients.net/archive... making a case for the concept of "patient as platform" which is a great soundbite that captures my view well. Sounds like the panel was really interesting certainly. - Cameron Neylon