"In 2017, more than one million people around the world gathered together in the largest event for science advocacy in history. In 2018, we unite again to hold our elected and appointed officials responsible for enacting equitable evidence-based policies that serve all communities and science for the common good."
About a thousand people showed up for our first local March last year. I wrote about that here.
https://steemit.com/science/@plotbot2015/march-for-science-greensboro
Scientists are pretty good problem-solvers.
We noticed several specific issues about last year's March, and came up with specific experiments to fix those issues and increase our impact.
- Fewer speech-givers, pre-screened for large crowd experience
- More complete sound coverage (not louder, just extra coverage of the area with dispersed speakers)
- Marching from one location to a second location, with different speeches and events at each one to maximize the attention span
- More outreach to partners who have specific campaigns already going on
- More T-shirts!
Last year's demographics definitely skewed towards professionals and families, who are already registered voters, for the most part. I'm personally working on some ways to engage college students, who vote in low numbers, for various reasons I described in my Election Day poll worker post from 2016. For instance, I plan to attend the North Carolina Academy of Sciences meeting in about a month to pitch mini-marches to the assembled undergraduate researchers from across the state. It fits perfectly with the theme of the meeting.
"Since this is the first time a community college is hosting this event, our theme focuses on the importance of scientific communication outside of traditional academia. Our goal is to encourage collaborative research within the scientific profession that is translated in a meaningful and relevant way to the general public, allowing scientists and laymen to actively contribute to the communities in which they live. There is an ever increasing need to bridge the wide gap between the scientific community and the general public, and as scientists we need to take responsibility for how information is disseminated. Our challenge is to transcend the boundaries of academia and actively pursue ways that our research can contribute to and engage with local communities."
We're also hoping to spawn some mini-Marches at our five local campuses, which together serve tens of thousands of students, in the afternoon and evening of April 14th. Students are notoriously not early risers.
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There are a large number of locations already scheduled, most of them in the US and Europe. If you have a local March for Science, please find a way to support that one. But if you check the list, and there is no March for Science near you, or if you just want to flex your crypto-muscles, my account @plotbot2015 will be accepting Steem and SBD on behalf of our local March. As far as I know, this makes us unique; the national organization is not accepting crypto, and neither is their swag store.
Any and all proceeds from this MfS series of posts will be spent by me on behalf of our local March, or on the campus mini-marches.
