IGNITE went to Mozilla Festival 2018!
Here is what happened in London and what Science Communication has to do with it.
When I received the e-mail saying that IGNITE session was chosen to be part of the 9th Mozilla Festival I was in Rio de Janeiro, trying to find strength with the dear friends I made at the Camp Serrapilheira after the tragical fire that destroyed part of our National Museum. Just a few days earlier I barely could get out of bed, I was questioning all of my work and my carer, a questioning framed by the flames from Quinta da Boa Vista, adorned with ironic and accusing comments on social media. “Scientists are unreachable”, “science communicators are not doing their jobs”, they said. However, we were there: 50 members of science outreach projects in an exceptional event, which gathered new and experienced communicators, from every corner of Brazil, with different concerns, all with the same love for knowledge sharing and with a sparkle in our eyes that represented the hope to see our country thrive through education.
It was in this environment that I got the news: I was going to London in a month and a half to talk with an even more diverse audience about accessibility in science communication. I was absolutly excited because MozFest is the conference/unconference/festival more insane I have ever seen! Besides, I already knew part of the Mozilla community and loved them and their commitment with inclusion. A MozFest session was exactly what IGNITE needed: it gathers completely different people, with completely different interests, and absolutely intangible backgrounds, but with the common interest in making knowledge more accessible and decentralized. This is the core of IGNITE.
Maria Letícia (co-leader of IGNITE) and I came up with a session plan to fill a gap on IGNITE workshops, that is inclusion and diversity in the audiences of the projects of science communication. Our training did not cover forms of science communication aimed at people with some type of sensory impairment yet. And we find that crucial. So we thought about the Festival, on its participants, and decided to go nuts (with a clear goal in mind): how can we communicate science in unconvetional ways using our senses? Can we make a podcast for the hearing impaired? How can we make videos that can be fun for those who have difficulties to see? And at the end of the proposal we asked the organization to help us with building blocks, toy musical instruments, plasticine and “smelling things”.
And you know what happened?
They got it all for us!
At the time of the session I had managed to bring together a very diverse team, with people with a history, for example, in teaching, publications and reviews of academic journals, neuroscience, and digital media. We first discussed the main barriers to accessing scientific information. We talked about language barriers, images in color schemes that makes visualization really hard, scientific articles in PDF’s, especially those that need to be paid for reading and those that do not have optical character recognition, and even the speech rate of the speaker.
And then we started to think of irreverent ways to solve these problems. Speakers who speak very fast? How about a word counter made with building blocks? What if we remembered to use more images in our videos to help overcome the language barrier? We can also tell a story about deforestation using seasoning smells that resemble forests and pollution (yuck!), with the help of bells that make us understand that the forests are being devastated faster and faster. And since the understanding of information depends on the point of view, how about using a plasticine sculpting with a color that works also for people who see colors in different ways and that can be interpreted differently by touch?
Unfortunately I did not take pictures of this moment because I was also playing, you will have to use your imagination. 😞
In the last five minutes of the session, we reviewed all we have learned and wrote down advices to scientists that intend to do some kind of science outreach, so they remember to do it in an accessible way. For exemple:
- Please be multimodal and as tactile as possible for the sake of people with kinesthetic and vision impairment issues.
- Use colour schemes that work in greyscale too.
- Alt text your illustrtions. Caption your images, videos and talks.
- Use humor and evidence. Know your audience. Make connections between phenomena and with real life. Be creative.
- Be clear, try to be simple and to make your files accessible.
- Learn how to communicate without jargon. Try to communicate with the most common words of your language.
- Challenge your assumption over what’s knowledge.
- Speak slower.
- Explain it to a 10-year-old. If they understand: great! If they don’t: your explanation won’t be understood by most people (they’re just too polite to admit). Try harder!
After this brainstorm full of love, I came back home with tons of ideas. The first thing I knew I had to do was to spread the word (just like I’m doing here). All the things that were made within those 60 minutes are priceless and I don’t know how to express how lucky I was with this oportunity!
In the next months we will include those and other ideias in IGNITE’s modules, and this is an invitation for you to help! IGNITE is an open project, and that means that we looooove when people are interested in remixing, changing, sharing, helping and criticizing. You can do all that in our GitHub repository, building collaborative documents at Google Docs, or sending us an e-mail.
Today, two months after the fire on our National Museum that meat so much for us, science communicators, I am sure that we are doing our best, that there are people working really hard on decentralization of knowledge, so things like that won’t happen anymore. Mozilla Festival represents that too. Those seven days of intense debates, learning and sharing about safety and awereness of data usage on the internet, cyberactivism, inclusion, decentralization, and transparency under the most diverse perspectives are the way for every citizen to have a voice in the global community. MozFest is a festival extremely concerned with decentralization of power, empowerment of people and communities, and these are also the ideals of IGNITE. It’s a match. ❤
