F.A.Q.

Added by Bryan Kennedy, last edited by Liza Pryor on Jul 28, 2008  (view change)

What is Science Buzz?

It's the "current science" initiative of the Science Museum of Minnesota, focused on science in the news, emerging research, and seasonal phenomena. We think it's a non-intimidating way to dig deeper into science headlines and share questions and concerns with scientists, museum staff, and other visitors.

It's both a website and a suite of physical exhibits, where we try to combine all the things that are good about a museum visit (objects, interactive experiences, activities, experiments, contextualized/relevant information, social occasion) with the best of cyberspace (conversations with others outside of space and time, access to experts and deeper resources, customization).

It offers lots of opportunities for visitors to create, role play, and interact. (Throughout our museum, we offer visitors chances to experiment with phenomena and make things. On Science Buzz, they're making and sharing content and ideas. And sometimes stuff, too.)

Why a website?

 There are practical benefits.

  • We didn't set out to create a website, or a community. We just needed the ability to quickly create and change professional-looking, high-quality exhibits about current science topics. (That said, we saw the writing on the wall, and we always had an eye on personalization of experience and other Web 2.0 opportunities.)
  • Where exhibit floor templates incorporate screens, we're able to update content in the visitor space immediately and at any time of day or night. We can do it from our desks, or from home, or while we're out on the road. We can even, in some cases, do it automatically. And it looks polished.
  • Content is automatically date-stamped and threaded. You can follow a conversation, or watch for updates, corrections, new resources, additional media, etc., over time.
  • We can easily re-purpose content, and everything is archived and available.

There are some bigger picture issues, too.

  • Until a few years ago, if you googled "museum" and "blog," one of the top hits was the blog for the Creation Museum in Kentucky. Science and natural history museums, for the most part, we just not in the game. (As of 6/6/08, answersingenesis.org is still the #8 listing.)
  • Similarly, if you google the name of your institution or search for it on Flickr, you'll find that a cyber conversation is already going on about your place. If you want to be part of conversations about the work that you do, as an institution, you have to get out there and participate.
  • We don't want visitors to just receive information. We want them to respond to what they learn, to value it, to organize it, and maybe even to characterize themselves as "scientists" in some respect--or at least to see the science happening around them and to engage with it. Social media is perfect for doing this, but museums have been slow to adopt it.

What has Web 2.0 technology done for us?

  • Blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies are everywhere, and people are coming to expect them. Visitors don't want content pushed at them; they want to contribute their own experiences and interpretations. On Buzz, visitors' voices are an integral part of the experience. Jumping to a blog format suddenly meant that visitors could talk directly to museum staff. And scientists. And each other.
  • Other "experts"--whether we invite them or not--can contribute to conversations and post content.
  • We can extend a visit beyond the museum's walls, connecting visitors to deeper resources, events, citizen science opportunities, etc.
  • We can see what visitors are searching for and what they have questions about, and respond. We can also follow the "science talk" that happens on the site and attempt to influence the conversation. And we can lower the bar for participation with features like polls.
  • Because we have to categorize content for the web anyway, we can do that via "pop" categories (folksonomies, tagging) and by MN K-12 science standards.
  • There is a certain voice to Buzz, but each scientist/blogger writes as him or herself. There's room for personal narrative and individual voice, which can make esoteric or complex stories more compelling.
  • There is autonomy and freedom to choose.
  • And Science Buzz is always open.

How is Science Buzz NOT just a website on the exhibit floor?

We lock down displays and customize them so that browsing Science Buzz at the museum is a lot like using a traditional multimedia piece. It just happens to be one that updates itself in real time and that you can contribute to.

We think "context makes you smart." We aren't journalists and there are a lot of other blogs and media out there that can cover "science" better than we can. But we can provide context. We can couple a story about something new (an interactive about how an engine works) with a current science story (which biofuel is most efficient?). We take advantage of the fact that museums are social places, where people are talking, interacting, and sharing the experience. And we hope that people who are visiting, having fun, doing things, talking to each other, and already in the science-y frame of mind are more likely to engage with us and contribute.

Initial evaluation revealed two huge challenges

  1.  We think that science is an essential literacy. Visitors might not ever need to create a recombinant vaccine or a clone, manipulate quantum dots, or generate a stem cell line, but they're asked to make sense of issues surrounding those techniques and products with every election, trip to the grocery, or visit to the doctor's office. But visitors aren't necessarily interested in "current science"---they don't immediately see the relevance to their everyday lives. Showing how compelling science is happening all around you every day is our constant challenge. We need to find methods to engage and encourage visitors, to draw them in. And sometimes content itself ain't it.
  2. People don't think of museums as places to learn about up-to-the minute research or the scientific issues around a story that was on the news last night. (Even when they come across that information at a museum, they convince themselves that they must have seen it somewhere else.) So we're constantly fighting that perception, and that means we really have to be responsive, fast, and change frequently.

What's hype? What's reality?

Truth? We don't really know yet. 

  • Summative evaluation will be completed in 2008.
  • In 2007, Michigan State University's Center for Writing in Digital Environments (MSU-WIDE) was awarded a 3-year Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) grant to use discourse analysis to study the "co-creation of knowledge" on Science Buzz and other museum Web 2.0 sites. 

It's easier to get a "flat picture" of online activity (number of visitors, demographics, site navigation, etc.), but we don't truly even have that.

  • By definition, all registered users of Science Buzz are 13 or older due to the Child Online Privacy Protection Act.

We use Google Analytics to get a very rudimentary picture of Science Buzz web traffic originating outside of the museum (or partner museums). As of 6/6/08:

  • We get 60-80,000 hits per month, and about 10% of those visitors have used the site before.
  • We have some 1800 registered users. 
  • We get visitors each month from every continent except Antarctica (and we even get Antarctica sometimes), about 160-170 countries, and every US state as well as the District of Columbia.
  • Our highest concentration of users is in the Twin Cities metro area.

There are a few other kinds of recognition that suggest we might be on the right track:

  • We won Best Overall Museum Website and Best Innovative or Experimental Application at the 2006 Museums and the Web conference.
  •  Articles about Science Buzz appeared in ASTC Dimensions ("Building Science Buzz: Open Source Opens Doors," July/August, 2006) and Museum Practice (August, 2007). We were also one of the subjects of University of Washington Museology student Lynn Bethke's 2007 master's thesis, "Constructing Connections: A Museological Approach to Blogging." She described Buzz as "exciting, interesting, weird, and fascinating posts on up to the minute science stories and issues." (Thank you, Lynn!)
  • We've talked individually with some XX other institutions about creating something similar or actually using Science Buzz at other institutions. (And we'd be happy to talk to you, too!)
  • Science Buzz components have been incorporated into other exhibitions:
    • Michigan State University Museum (no longer on the exhibit floor)
    • North Carolina Museum of Life and Science (2 kiosks: health, climate change)
    • The Field Museum of Natural History's Nature Unleashed (natural disasters)
    • The American Museum of Natural History's Water: H20=Life (water)
    • Science Museum of Minnesota's Disease Detectives (infectious diseases)
    • Science Museum of Minnesota's Future Earth
    • PBS/Twin Cities Public Television/Science Museum of Minnesota's Human Spark

Operations

Is there anything we won't post?

See our community guidelines. In general, we post everything except posts deemed offensive/inappropriate (definition in community guidelines), or posts that are off-topic and/or not related to current science.

  • Only the topic of creationism has been especially problematic, with posters cutting and pasting unattributed text from other sites, and generally repeating the same examples and arguments over and over again. We addressed these at first, and we still do when we get a sense that someone is asking real questions, but we also asked the SMM board to draft a policy on creationism that we include with our community guidelines to explain why we no longer participate in debate on the issue.

We love controversial topics and have covered stories like:

What's our participation rate?

[BK, we once calculated this at about 10%. Do you remember how we did that? And we once tried to figure our "signal to noise ratio," too, but now I have no notes on that.]

How do we moderate the comments?

In all honesty, moderation hasn't been a problem for us. We have a clear set of guidelines explaining what we won't post, and we otherwise post just about everything. 

  • Comments from registered users go live immediately, and aren't held for moderation at all.
  • Comments left by unregistered users are held for moderation. Four people check the moderation queue on a regular basis, and we estimate it takes less than three hours per week, total.
  • Yes, we get a lot of comments of the "Yo, yo, this is Tiffany---big shout out to all my peeps!" variety. We quickly publish all the good stuff out of the moderation queue, and leave the rest. We use a bulk delete tool every day or so to empty the queue of "noise."
  • Yes, we also get a lot of SPAM. That's held in a separate queue, and we use bulk delete to get rid of it after a quick check to make sure that no good stuff was mistakenly tagged as SPAM.

What's our staffing?

Bryan Kennedy and Liza Pryor co-developed Science Buzz and maintain editorial control.

Joe Imholte manages the Scientist on the Spot feature and handles requests for Buzz exhibits at other institutions.

Gene Dillenburg writes Object of the Month and various other features, and blogs and responds to questions/comments.

John Gordon and Thor Carlson, exhibit developers, blog and develop stanchion panels and Scientist on the Spot features.

Mark Ryan and Art Oglesby, interpretive staff on the museum floor, contribute to the blog.

Dion O'Keefe, project production manager, handles our fabrication needs and helps us to move exhibits around at SMM. Margaret King, graphic designer, designs our graphics. (We have in-house fabrication and print shops.)

[total staffing ]

What did it cost to develop Science Buzz?

We won a $500K grant from the Bush Foundation to do our initial prototyping and planning.

We then won $1.5M from NSF to further develop and refine the prototypes and to scale up the entire operation.

We think that the entire operation, including significant exhibit floor changeouts and new content/templates, is sustainable into the future with about $180K/year.

Technology

  • Do we host our own website
    •  No.  We use an external host. 
      • [Insert justification here]
      • We don't want to be server experts
      • Scalability
      • Very fast connection to the internet backbone.  OC-3 or OC-8.  T1, don't cut it.
      • 24 hour support
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