The Future of Public Outreach

Another one of my weekly profiles appeared on SLAC Today this morning,* and it is another shining example of why I typically enjoy doing profiles. I was a little doubtful when a coworker approached me with the profile idea of a woman at SLAC who loves things that are "tiki" themed. I didn't see much of a story there.

I was wrong.

Read the profile and you'll find out why. It's a great profile and she's a very interesting person. She's got a great job and does fantastic work on websites, and never went to college. She's self-taught. It flies in the face of everything I've ever been taught about getting a good job in technology…

Anyways, today's topic is about the future of public outreach, particularly at SLAC and similar particle physics labs. There has been a lot of discussion recently on how to modernize the public outreach effort. The ideas range from promoting employees to list SLAC on their Facebook or MySpace profiles to creating an entire lab environment on Second Life.

The Facebook and MySpace outreach/group idea isn't bad, but I don't know enough about Second Life to comment on this. Personally, I don't understand the whole phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that the lab couldn't reach thousands of people through such an effort.

The idea of Second Life is that you create a character, pick a place to live, and create an entire second life for yourself. You get a job, buy clothes, buy cars, meet people, date, and who knows what else. There's a lot of people out there who spend more time on Second Life than they do in their real life. Again, I don't understand this, but it exists, so SLAC should try to capitalize on it.

The other idea is to create some content on YouTube that would highlight the different labs and the science going on at them. Now this is a wonderful idea. The physics is so interesting and forward thinking that there's got to be a ton of visually stimulating places, people, and events they could put on YouTube.

I just read an article that claims YouTube is now responsible for 10% of all of the internet traffic, which is mind-boggling. This is obviously an outlet that you want to take full advantage of, if you can…

*Notice that I just can't bring myself to say "SLAC Today today..."