Recommendations

The reason why we set up a communication plan was that in our opinion communication to the public about our work is very important and during iGEM competition we experienced a perfect example of the complexity in communication.

A journalist visited our team in order to write an article about the iGEM competition and our project. We agreed that we as iGEM team would review the article before it would be published. In our opinion the article which this journalist wrote, was not objectively written and we couldn't agree on what message this article sent to the reader. Despite this the journalist decided to publish this article.

This is one of the major complications with communication to the public. The one who is actually informing the public, the journalist, is not completely familiar with the scientific details and he or she does not have the same insights as the scientist who is working on the subject. This creates a complication, because the journalist is not well informed about the subject and he or she can not inform the reader objectively and may not deliver the right message to the reader. This is exactly the reason why we find it important that scientists themselves are involved in informing the public, they know the details, have the knowledge, and are aware of the possibilities and impossibilities of subjects which they are working on. By shortening the communicating track these complexities could be avoided.

Our recommendation to the next iGEM teams:

• Contribute to the the public perception of Synthetic Biology. Participation of an iGEM team to the iGEM competition is partially possible by public resources (a lot of universities over the world are funded by public money from governments).
• Pay attention to the message that you as a team want to send to the outside world about your project and divide this message carefully.
• Use our communication plan as an example and improve upon it.