By Shane M Hanlon

We in Sharing Science do many different things. We’re scicomm trainers/practitioners, communicators, multimedia experts, artists, storytellers, and more. At the core of these various aspects of scicomm is the first item – training. Sharing Science was founded >5 years ago by my colleague Olivia with the goal of providing fellow scientists with the skills, tools, and resources they need to communicate science with any audience. The primary (and personally our favorite) mode of doing that is was in-person workshops. In addition to the work that we’d do at our annual meeting, we’d travel to universities and institutions to conduct workshops on a variety of topics from scicomm basics, to working with members of the press and/or policymakers, to using multimedia to communicate, to establishing and cultivating an online presence, and more. 

Then the coronavirus happened. No more in-person…well…anything. 

We were fortunate that in addition to our workshops, we have a great webinar series that’s accessible to anyone with an internet connection. And while we’re happy to offer our expertise, as well as that of many guest presenters, we really did miss the interactive parts of science communication training. There’s just something missing when talking at a group of people versus interacting with them. So, we took some time to do it right but we’re happy to announce that we have shifted our workshops online!

The complete list of our 2020 webinars.

With a handful already under our belt in 2020, we’re now accepting requests for virtual workshops in 2020. They can be anywhere from a few hours to a few days, with our standard offering being two, four-hour workshops spread out over multiple days (sitting at a computer for eight hours straight is rough…). We cover all sorts of topics with the main buckets falling into:

• General science communication (all workshops contain some aspect of this)
• Working with policymakers
• Working with journalists
• Communicating via multimedia (e.g. photos, video, audio, art)
• Digital and social meeting

We’re excited for this new way of working with you and, while we look forward to the time when we can meeting again in person, we hope that you’ll take advantage of our scicomm expertise as we also learn from all of you!

–Shane M Hanlon is Program Manager of AGU’s Sharing Science program. Find him on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.