CAnMove goes to Science Communication Forum, Gothenburg

”With hundreds of activities and about 70,000 visits The International Science Festival in Gothenburg is one of Europe’s leading popular science events and the only one of its kind in Sweden.”

 For me, CAnMove´s representative at The International Science Festival in Gothenburg, Thursday afternoon was spent in multiple seminars about science communication. Theme for this years festival was "Act, react, interact".

Many colleagues from Lund University slowly emerged from the mass of 280 people attending. To be truthful, there were two main joys with the get-together. I am sure anyone who has ever gone to a conference can attest to this:

1. You meet colleagues (that you not normally meet), and you meet new exciting people.
2. You get a lot of ideas for your own studies or projects

Many discussions revolved around communicators and their eternal dilemma of making strategic plans. Well, can´t really say that CAnMove has that problem.

The best and worst talk

Ray McHug, Head of Media and Corporate Communications, from University of Stratclyde in Glascow, Scotland, was Keynote speaker of the Forum. He talked about how the university used it´s strategic communicaton to make it “the place of useful learning” (that were the words that permeate the whole university). I was lead to believe that this was going to be a talk about how storytelling can help you get a message across, but I was surprised that the storytelling was minimal. Focus was put on prizes that the university had won for being the best university in UK. The best thing about the talk, was that Ray McHug really could show that the university is working together with industry to produce useful things and useful learning.

Many questions remain though; how did his previous tabloid press career help him to manage the communication from Stratclyde? Are there any women there? Should Sweden have similar prizes to conjure up a list of the most entrepreneurial/best research/best reputed universities in our country?

Technology was used to “get a feeling”

The arrangers tried a community-based, Cotunity, tool to measure and get a feeling of peoples thoughts during the forum for communication. There was also a prize for the person among the attendants that commented the most on Cotunity. Funnily, the guy who won, commented that there was an awful lot of communication discussed and very little science. Agree!

The rest of the Science Festival, I did not really attend (duty called elsewhere), but the program was filled with interesting things! Perhaps next year!

/Caroline

Image: International Science Festival