THE EUROPEAN PROJECT
“SCICAFÉ”
In
2007, many people from several science cafés in Europe met in
Ajaccio (Corse) for the 10th anniversaire of the network Bars et
Cafés des sciences. In this occasion it was proposed to apply to a
suitable UE grant for the constitution of an European network of
science cafés. There were already networks among UK, USA and French
science cafés, but no European coordination. Moreover, these
networks mainly deal with a presentation of the various locations.
In
January 2010, the European Project "Scicafé"
(www.scicafe.eu) has started. The project's main target is to create
a European network of science cafés. We aim to identify the best
practices used in this kind of scientific popularization and
participation, promote the birth of new cafés, especially in eastern
countries and in Africa; enlarge the audience of our events to young
people and other classes.
The
project is essentially in the phase of data collecting, however some
of us have started experimenting some new techniques and modalities
that resulted to be quite interesting, and forced us to learn new
skills. we shall illustrate some of these experiments carried out by
our association, in collaboration with others. Most of
them were suggested by our public through a questionnaire, that is
now being administered to an European public through our partners in
the consortium.
Cafferenze:
Sometimes an interesting theme is not suited for a science café,
mainly because it is too technical and the public may have a few
questions to ask. So we launched an hybrid between a science café
(caffè-scienza) and a conference (conferenza), that we called
“cafferenza”. They are quite successful (and hosted in a
beautiful library, http://www.biblioteche.comune.fi.it/biblioteca_delle_oblate/).
Moka
and RadioMoka: we started a newsletter (Moka, the Italian name for
the coffee machine in Figure 1) and a radio transmission (RadioMoka,
www.novaradio.info), this last experience really required quite
different skills from those that we studied in the university!
Audio
and video streaming: We are collaborating with RadioSpin
(www.radiospin.poloprato.unifi.it), one of the web radios of the
University of Firenze, and, with our twin association formascienza in
Rome, experimenting with the video streaming service offered by one
of our partners, DBC-tv (www.dbc-tv.net) and other independent
services (livestream.com). Thanks to DBC-tv, now our events can be
attended even from Second Life, and actually we have a few people
that regularly follows us from Spain, Switzerland and USA.
The
science café web book, in collaboration with Duncan Dallas from
Leeds, who is essentially the “inventor” of science cafés in UK,
sites.google.com/site/scicafewebbook, We felt that we were
concentrating too much on the technical aspects, forgetting that a
science café is mainly driven by passions and emotions. So we asked
people from all the world to send us a few lines about their
motivations, and we discovered that the same simple concept of a
science café can indeed be interpreted in very different ways, from
a discussion on how to prevent HIV infection in Uganda, to gender
differences in Iran, to a specialized Nuclear Science Café in
Oregon!
Figure
3: The
location of the contributors to The Science Café web book
Survey
on Science Cafè's Public. In November 2009, we sent an email to all
those who are included in the mailing list of the "Science Café
Firenze" in which we asked to fill out an online survey The
purpose of the survey was to gather real data to assess some aspects
of both the current situation of "Science Cafe"in our city,
both to identify the effective ways for its advancement and growth.
In
particular, we sought to know the type of audience that attended the
meetings, the degree of meetings held, new forms, in terms of manner
of use of science cafés.
In
February 2011 we shared the survey with the partners of the European
Project to find out audiences in relation to the various countries,
highlighting the differences or similarities.
CONCLUSIONS
Science
and technology are more and more important in our lives, and we are
often asked to choose (or vote) on technical questions. A science
discussion is often seen as a popularization event, but it should be
rather termed participation. The purpose of the science café is that
of demythologizing science communication, bringing it out of the
cathedra and into everyday life. The scicafé European project will
be hopefully useful for this goal, favoring the birth of new cafés
in new places, favouring discussion through new media, involving new
public and networking all such experiences.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We
acknowledge useful discussions with your partners in the project
SciCafé, in particular with Tommaso Castellani of FormaScienza,
Rome, and Duncan Dallas of Leeds, UK.
