Overview
Description:
This forum places participants in the role of a governmental funding agency and asks them to consider how nanotechnology should fit into the timeline and scope of future national energy policy.
A scientific expert begins the forum by providing a brief intro to nanotechnology and describing some of its potential benefits and possible uncertainties. A short video follows with three expert perspectives who discuss three possible energy funding strategies: Nanotechnology-dependent energy technologies. Existing alternative energy technologies. Conservation and energy efficiency.
The participants are then asked to consider how they would allocate $100 million of hypothetical research and implementation funding between the strategies. Discussion cards describing various hypothetical scenarios are then presented to the groups, and the groups are asked to consider whether and how these scenarios might change their funding allocations.
Checklist
Scientist reviewed?
Peer reviewed?
Visitor evaluation?
Permissions
Creative Commons
Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike
We have run this forum twice
We have run this forum two times thus far, once at the Museum of Science and once offsite at Northeastern University. The nice thing about the forum is that we only needed to get one speaker to deliver an intro to nanotech (we used a Museum educator both times), because the various policy/societal aspects are handled by the folks in the video.
People seemed to enjoy considering the situations posed to them by the discussion cards. Most of them would have stayed longer if we had allowed it. The content is interesting to people but some folks had concerns that we were not giving them enough detail as to what their hypothetical research/implementation funding dollars might buy them.
Please feel free to contact me if you need help with the videos or any logistics in planning this forum.
- David Sittenfeld...
Museum of Science, Boston