---
title: manifesto documentation
tags: manifesto
---

Our process, in brief, has been:
1. Workshop was held with notes taken by assistants. [I’m trying to find this---the SciBeh notion page got upgraded and so it’s moved!]
2. We invited attendees to sign up as authors or CLAs, with the commitments laid out (specifically: minimally a paragraph of writing for authors)
3. Three different structures proposed (Ulrike, Miso, Dawn). Miso + Dawn independently reviewed the workshop notes and highlighted relevant points. This is all the stuff in the initial outline after the << NEW STRUCTURE AFTER VOTING ENDS HERE >> line on the g-doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xbWN9BwfKz4bzRKt0KHc9GaFjOUsPqmh/edit
4. CLAs had a meeting to discuss structure, based on this proposal after people had commented as a springboard for discussion:

• Establishing the problems that require CI as a solution
o Current platforms/channels & limitations
o External forces (“landscape” of SciComm and actors involved)
• Establish the role/principles of science and its scope
• Define CI in the context of SciComm
• Necessary components of a CI SciComm system
o Developing and communicating consensus
o Transparent standards of assessment
o Communicating to policymakers, journalists, and public (including about how science work, education and media/science literacy)
o Incentives to participate and/or communicate effectively---at institution and societal/policy level
• Challenges and open questions/setting the research agenda

(And within all of the above, examples of what works and what doesn’t.)

5. CLAs agreed in meeting to vote on relevance of all points raised in (2) – voting spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LvDRi5b_axBhK-Qm04pezdOsN5dbydT5ocOesE3uIvc/edit#gid=0; CLAs also identified which section it should be in (Introduction, Why CI, What is CI, Things we need, Key challenges, Other)
6. Votes were aggregated, and two proposals made for how to allocate sections, as Miso’s screenshot of the email shows (note both have the same structure, they just differ in how we parcel out work)—we went with Proposal B
7. We gave authors and CLAs preliminary assignments, but with the opportunity to choose what sections they wanted instead, up to a deadline, after which assignments were fixed. No author/CLA emailed in requesting changes.
8. CLAs split into groups to organise their writers into writing. First draft of text submitted into joint document https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TQfGDkvAMjF7pGuvenlzPf5KW2UwJgzqrckeDV2wFKU/edit by 1 Feb and sent out to everyone on the authorship team 2 Feb.
9. CLAs to discuss on 8 Feb …. Documentation to continue 😊

Roadblock with ORANGE group:
Our group has not delivered any text. One member went silent after the original contact email, a second sent an apologetic email last week saying they had been diverted with other tasks/issues. We thus need a Plan B for this section. One option is that I could draft something myself on Monday and everyone could then contribute to it in edit/revise, or we need to redistribute the task -- decision was UH started a short draft, which was expanded by SL.

CLA meeting 8 Feb: The team of coordinating lead authors met to discuss the way forward, and we agreed that we will produce at least two deliverables from here on: First, as initially planned, a relatively short manifesto that outlines the current problems and how we should move forward. Second, a paper targeted for a journal submission (we have already received an expression of interest from the Journal of Marketing Analytics).
Specifically, to generate the manifesto from the existing lengthy document, the team of coordinating lead authors will condense the paper at the above link into a list of brief statements (1 – 2 sentences at most). To increase the collective nature of the manifesto, we will then use those brief statements to create a voting exercise in the pol.is platform which all of you will be asked to contribute to. This exercise will ask you to decide for each statement whether that point should be made in the manifesto. This voting procedure will ensure that the production of the manifesto itself involves an exercise in collective intelligence.
We expect to have generated the full list of numbered statements by 18 February, and you can therefore expect to receive an invitation to contribute to the pol.is voting exercise before the end of February. We will select the content of the manifesto from the resulting votes (subject to some constraints about making sure the structure is still meaningful and so on).

You can complete voting here: https://pol.is/4tfypkeawa
Please submit your votes by Sunday, 6 March.

The purpose of the voting is to collectively determine what key "propositions" extracted from our lengthier draft are critical to the short manifesto.

This will be one of our (at least) two intended deliverables - the initially planned short manifesto (2-3 pages) that outlines the current problems and how we should move forward. We are therefore asking you to judge whether each proposition contains a core component that needs to be included.

(Currently there are 147 statements extracted from the long draft - for a brief 2-3 page manifesto, we would expect about 50.)

Propositions that are not voted in will still remain in the lengthier paper for journal publication (subject to edits and further discussion).
You can view the complete draft of the full length paper here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TQfGDkvAMjF7pGuvenlzPf5KW2UwJgzqrckeDV2wFKU/edit
And the extracted set of propositions for potential inclusion in the manifesto can be viewed as a full set here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WyoC34I91J9WUVBNjWtaL1O7I8BsFMQJTJ5DtPlrHfE/edit

DH then went over pol.is report and extracted propositions that received (1) > 60%, (2) > 70%, and (3) > 75% support.

And some notes about our discussion (as a record to keep documenting the process):

Problems with the extracted propositions:
• V1 & 2 are insufficient as is because they have no articulation of what collective intelligence means in practice or how it would be implemented in science communication
• Everything articulates the problem well, not so much what to do about it – this may be a problem that goes further back in the process (and is not a function of the proposition extraction or voting)
• We may need to recognise this is just the state of the community now: we recognise that there are problems with science communication but not necessarily how it can be fixed, and this will evolve.
• The propositions are also different in type – they include different problems, for instance – structural, individual, related to incentives, infrastructure etc.
• There is also some repetition of points – re-ordering and then slimming down might help.

What is the focus of a Manifesto?
• It should lay out the general direction of travel – we have to say what's the problem we want to address, and the general idea that will drive our research line, not necessarily the details. (e.g.,: Here's the problem - this is what we know - we've got to do this differently and we have to do it collectively.)
• But Manifestos should also include "prescriptive notions for carrying out changes the author believes should be made"

How to solve the problems:
• We can start with one version (e.g. ,V2) and then take the statements and flesh them out
• The Table and Figure from RED group may help to flesh out collective intelligence and their examples more – we could not put this into the voting system, but we can include these in the manifesto. – highlighted because I forgot to list this as an action, but we agreed to include these.
• Possibly the different types of issues in the propositions could have different CI solutions and a way to address it is to lay out the types of problems and then present a solution (from somewhere in the paper, as it may still be there) for it.
• Perhaps we have not “dug deep enough” among the collective as we did not ask them for ideas. It’s worth going to them again and saying we assembled this aggregate of statements that received support, but realised it doesn’t tell us much about operationalising collective intelligence, so we’re asking if you have any more creative ideas. – some disagreement here about whether it was worth it, and whether this needs to be an unstructured blank slate for people to throw ideas onto vs. a constructed table that they add to.

Other discussion:
• Our process is implicitly our version of collective intelligence as an example in itself, and that could be captured.
• There were some objectionable statements that didn’t make it into V1/2 (but maybe one appears in V3) – it seems the collective voting process may have taken care of that.

And the concluding actions were as listed below.

1. Ulrike to set up Google doc and send all authors an email to encourage ideas. Attach V2 of extracted propositions to showcase why we think a bit more is needed – send email today
2. Katy to organise V3 into a more coherent order and circulate it – tomorrow
3. We can take out the pink propositions, and if there are no objections with content at that point…
4. Then Steve will turn it into prose.

(1) We have now looked at the voting and the sets of claims that leads to. Attached is the document that lists all statements that garnered 70%+ of the vote. While these statements already have a great ‘manifesto’ like feel, reading them, it also became clear that we don’t clearly articulate what we mean by collective intelligence and what forms it might take specifically in science communication. In part, this is because the draft included a Table with examples that -being a Table- was not converted to statements for voting. But it probably also reflects the fact that we have (collectively) spent diagnosing problems than brainstorming visionary new solutions.

We thus thought it would be good to initiate one more round of our ‘manifesto-writing-as-collective-intelligence’ process and encourage all contributors to try and come up with some ways the SciComm as CI idea might be further developed in future.

To do that, simply add whatever ideas you might have (however ill/well-formed!) to this google doc, and let’s see what we can come up with:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ou0z0MSeCaSPxh9-yEh7wiJlspMsjHQfXXVHPsPvNp0/edit?usp=sharing

many thanks!
Ulrike
P.S.in parallel, we will also be working on turning the extant proposition set into readable prose

(2)Re-ordered propositions and headings attached. There was definitely more than one way of doing this (and some propositions could fit in multiple places) so feel free to edit / suggest something entirely different!

(4) Dear all, see enclosed for my first stab at a prose version of the manifesto. Just for fun, I used AI to help me write this and I refrained from editing just so you can see what the machine can do. There are some glitches but it’s not absurd as is.
Thoughts?

Very impressive! Though it does look to me like it needs to be a bit more readable in places. For example, I had trouble parsing this statement:

We should not underestimate the capacity of disinformation lobbying groups to disrupt systems designed for communal science communication, so that collectively supported evidence is weighted equally versus collectively supported viewpoints.

Happy to have a go at editing at whatever point that would be most helpful.

Anyway, possibly you'll feel I’ve changed the text too much - as such, I’m reattaching the propositions and have also used track changes to make it a bit easier to revert things back if needed.

2 CLAs added more changes and reached a version 4 CLAs were content with
2 CLAs requested more revisions.

Publication of shortform
Angelo handled nice PDF version
Dawn & Stefan wrote up and published online version
Angelo made endorsement function for authors and sent to all workshop attendees
Ulrike wrote to workshop speakers for endorsements

Work began on long form manuscript
All CLAs then extracted long form into structure of short form

Katy and Dawn began editing of long form into a coherent piece.

CLAs suggested journal targets, Dawn made poll for CAs to vote on. CAs suggested more targets, OA discussed as a criteria.