Communicating Science and Connecting people: An interview with Bora Zivkovic, the Scientific American editor

Danica Radovanovic — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 09:56:59 +0000

Photo credits: Travis Dove, The New York Times

Jean Cocteau once said that the art is science made clear, but what he didn’t indicate is that the science is creating different forms of art including the art of connecting people and communicating science. Bora Zivkovic is a unique, energetic, technologically-savvy, and multidisciplinary scientist, connector, and blogger. I met Bora twice: during the Science Online 2009 and Science Online 2010 conference in Raleigh NC, USA, and on many other occasions online, and he would always motivate me with incredible energy and passion for science and people. I would say that Bora is the real science connector, not only communicating and articulating science in its many forms but also connecting people, networks, and the scientific communities world wide.

Born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia (now Serbia), Bora’s studies of veterinary medicine were interrupted by the 1990s war in the Balkans, when he arrived in the USA. He went to graduate school at North Carolina State University where he studied how bird brains measure time of day (circadian rhythms) and time of year (photoperiodism). He started A Blog Around the Clock in 2004 as a prolific science blogger. He was the online Community Manager for the open access journal PLoS ONE. He is now the editor of Scientific American’s blog network, organizes the annual ScienceOnline conference, and is the editor of The Open Laboratory, an annual collection of the best writing from science blogs.

He even interviewed me once, as a host of a series of interviews with various scientists, bloggers, educators, and journalists; and now is my turn to ask Bora questions I always wanted to ask him. I had an opportunity to interview him and here are the questions and perceptive, knowledgeable, and fun responses.

Welcome to Australian Science! Recently the Science Online 2012, #scio12 has finished, and impressions are still spreading online among scientists, bloggers, journalists by sharing blog posts, videos, tweets. How do you feel after this year’s conference? Do you think that some things and social dynamics during this conference have changed comparing to previous conferences? I’ve seen familiar names tweeting online, people I met in person in 2009 and 2010. What has changed in the conference dynamics since then?

We were very aware that growing a meeting by 50% can change the dynamics. We spent the entire year discussing strategies for ensuring that the intimate atmosphere of the meeting does not vanish. I wrote quite a lot about this in my long blog post after the event, especially about the need to make sure that so many new people feel welcome and instantly included into the community – including all the fun parts of the event. We completely changed the daily schedule in order to foster more informal interractions, we (really, Karyn Traphagen) designed the Cafe Room with this in mind, and we put quite a lot of effort in our communications on the blogs (including my post which was recommended to all to read beforehand), emails and social media, to prepare everybody for the unconference format and for the unique blend of serious discussions and crazy fun of ScienceOnline. For the most part, judging from what people are saying on their blogs and in our feedback forms, we were successful.

You are an influential leader of the scientific blogging network community – I may say – worldwide. You have a lot of experience in the curating, managing, coordinating scientific events, scientific blogs, and online communities. You’ve been organizing the ScienceOnline conference for the past 6 years and also serve as series editor for The Open Laboratory anthology. You’ve worked as PLoS online community manager and now work in the role of Editor at the Scientific American blogs. What are the best strategies for building and maintaining blog network (out of scratch)?

Building a blog network from scratch is actually a wonderful experience – one gets to turn one’s vision into reality. Of course, building a network hosted on the Scientific American website is not exactly “from scratch”, as the power of the brand (as well as the resources of the organization) almost guarantee visibility and traffic from the start. I spent several years as a blogger at Scienceblogs.com so I could experience (and later analyze) many aspects of the community building at that site – definitely insights I used in building the SA network later on. Also, just before Scientific American hired me, I was briefly involved in the planning and early organization of the PLoS Blogs and Scientopia blogs. In both of these, my voice was one of several. At Scientific American I was hired specifically to do this, so I had more freedom to build exactly the kind of network I wanted to.

The key to the success of a network are its people. I had the luxury of having nine long months to think about it. I dug through the archives and started following literally thousands of science blogs. I used Twitter to ask for suggestions for even more blogs, especially blogs that do a particular ‘thing’, e.g,. writing about a particular topic in a particular style. What I was looking for was to assemble a team, rather than produce a “best of” list. I wanted a group of people who will be joy to work with, who will have fun communicating with each other in the backforums and in their blogs’ comment sections, and who will be naturally inclined to feel as members of a community, not just writers for hire.

Of course, there are many people like that, so I also made sure that, within the limits of size and budget, I include quite a lot of diversity. When I say ‘diversity’ I am not talking just about coverage of as many topics and scientific disciplines as we can accommodate, but also diversity in voices. I wanted to have people on the network who can speak to different audiences, so I wanted to find people of varied backgrounds (geography, career path, age, gender, race/ethnicity, etc.), with different writing styles, writing at different “reading levels”, etc, in order to capture as broad and varied audience for the network as a whole. Inclusion of several bloggers who communicate well using media other than text was also very important to me, as art, illustration, video, music, photography, cartoons, animations, infographics and other ways of communicating science are just as important as good text writing for extending our reach and capture new audiences.

It is also important to understand that a blog network is not static. Bloggers come and go. It is OK – life and career sometimes force people to take different directions, which may entail stopping blogging temporarily or permanently, or taking one’s blog in a completely different direction. It is important to make these transitions smoothly without disrupting the community and the overall tone of the network.

As a science blogger and network community manager, what’s the one piece of advice you would give to people who want to curate and manage their local and national blogging communities? And what is your advice to bloggers, scholars, scientists, educators, and journalists who want to write for those scientific online networks? I have noticed that relationships, people and linking matter the most, I would like to hear your thoughts.

Analyze the audience. Make a vision that fits it (and expands to other audiences you want to attract). Then – ignore personal friendships! Both you and I have thousands of friends in the science blogging circles. Many of them are fantastic bloggers whose blogs I read religiously. Yet I did not invite them to the network because their blogging topics and styles do not fit the vision I have for the network. Some of the bloggers who ended up on the network happen to be my friends, but they are here because of what they do and how they do it. Other bloggers on the network I only first encountered when I started looking around really hard – I liked their writing, I started communicating with them online, perhaps “tested” them on the Guest Blog, and decided they were a good fit. I also deliberately chose a few bloggers who are veterans, people who have experience, reputation and authority, people who can help on a bad day when trolls are all over a bloggers’ comment section, or if there are uncertainties in the troops (and of course, they already have many regular readers who will follow their blogs onto the new hosting network). But most are relatively new or young bloggers who I thought had great talent and potential. Most have more than repaid my trust in them and grew into tremendous forces of high-quality blogging.

You are an avid twitterer and I remember you used FriendFeed a lot. What social web tools are you using these days the most besides Twitter? What social media tools help you now for promoting the work and networking and which one do you use for professional development?

Twitter is still my main social network where I spend the most time and do most of the interraction – this is where I discover stuff, promote stuff, and talk with people. I also post links to most of my bloggers’ posts on my Facebook and Google Plus pages. If interraction there happens, and it often does, I am happy to go there as well to reply, but these are definitely not taking up much of my time. I am only very superficially exploring the worlds of Tumblr, Posterous, Quora and Pinterest, am studiously avoiding LinkedIn (though I have a profile there – and probably everywhere), have pretty much abandoned FriendFeed since it was bought by Facebook, and use other sites (e.g., YouTube and Flickr) mainly as repositories rather than places where I expect to get much interraction. I see quite a lot of potential in Google Plus which, I sometimes joke, is how FriendFeed would look like if it continued developing.

I have a feeling that the new social web paradigm in science, technology and education cannot sustain without building relationships and links. Do you find the human factor and the power of community prevailing over machines and tools we are using? Are we finally getting to the point that despite McLuhan’s “that tools will be using us

Cite this article:
Radovanovic D (2012-02-28 09:56:59). Communicating Science and Connecting people: An interview with Bora Zivkovic, the Scientific American editor. Australian Science. Retrieved: May 17, 2024, from http://australianscience.com.au/interviews/communicating-science-and-connecting-people-an-interview-with-bora/
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