I want to thank you for your interest in the Non-English science communication session of Scio14 (#ScioLang), and to thank you very much for offering your help to make it a great session.
Here is a description of this session at Science Online Together, happening this February 27th: https://ivanfgonzalez.com/2e-non-english-science-communication-discussion-at-scio14/
Your help and input will be invaluable to bring perspectives from outside the world experienced by most of the attendants to the conference. But also to make #ScioLang a space for discussion about this subject on Twitter.
I am aware that not all of you are able to attend the conference this year, so I am especially thankful that you are willing to take an active role on Twitter. First of all, I am requesting your personal input. I want to learn from your experience as consumers and generators of science content, in English (as a second Language), and in your target Language. Second I need you to be a contact person, somebody who can give non-English speakers a voice in an audience of mostly English-speaking science communicators.
For that role I am asking you to help me reaching out on Twitter using your language and collecting the thoughts and voices of people, translating to English what you think it would add value to the conversation.
I would like to suggest an strategy and rough timeline for you to use on Twitter (but of course, at the end of the day you do it your own way, whatever works for you, and doing what you are comfortable with doing).
Starting 23 of January: Begin identifying Twitter voices in your language that consistently talk about science, science publishing, science communication, or similar subjects. Some of them may be your friends and colleagues, some of them may be new for you, found after doing a search for keywords. Follow their tweets and learn what discussions are relevant at the moment.
Starting Jan 30th: Begin the engagement either by contacting people directly or by broadcasting to your followers. You may want to use a #ScioLang_X hashtag (i.e Spanish could be #Sciolang_ESP). I realize the most fair hashtag for the whole session would have been #ScioLang _ENG, but I do not assign the conference’s hashtags. Feel free to also use the #ScioLang hashtag during your discussion, specially when there are points or conversations you want to highlight, I will be following the hashtag #ScioLang and building a Storify of the discussion prior to the conference.
Starting February 6th: Write down what you have learned from your discussions on Twitter. Can you identify some common trends in the way science is generated, shared, and communicated in your own language? Is there something that people that doesn’t speak your language needs to know from you? Share it with us via email, hopefully we will identify some commonalities, interesting case studies, and shared treads to emphasize in #ScioLang.
Starting February 13th: Start a more aggressive social media advertisement of the #sciolang session. Send tweets with the date and time of session, encourage people to use #ScioLang to ask questions and to participate directly.
Starting February 20th: Keep sending tweets with the date and time of session, encourage people to use #ScioLang to ask questions and to participate directly.
The 27th of February try to be available at noon (East Coast time) to follow the #ScioLang hashtag on twitter.
Thank you very much everyone. Please contact me any time with suggestions and questions. I hope by the second week of February we will have collected enough feedback from non-English speakers to make of this a really informative, thought-provoking, and collaboration-sparkling session.
This is the list with the names of our AWESOME team of volunteers:
- English: Ivan Fernando Gonzalez (@gonzalezivanf)
- Spanish: Mónica Feliú-Mójer (@moefeliu).
- German: Brian Glanz (@BrianGlanz) and Beatrice Lugger (@BLugger)
- Dutch: Marianne Alleyne (@Cotesia1)
- Portuguese: Cristina Russo (@russo_cristina)
- Mandarin: Ben Young Landis (@younglandis)
- Bahasa Indonesian: Sheyka N. (@sheyka)
- Italian: Cristina Rigutto (@cristinarigutto)
- Danish: Daniel Noesgaard (@dnnyboy)
- Filipino: Shaira Panela (@ShaiPanela)
- Arabic: Sari Sabban (@SariSabban)
- Bangla (#ScioLang_BN): Kausik Datta (@kausikdatta22 )
- Hindi (#ScioLang_HN): Kausik Datta (@kausikdatta22 )