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How to Start Your Own Science Festival
Guest Writer
Updated Feb 02, 2015Save
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Table of contents
Michael Motskin, CEO of the Pint of Science festival
Wouldn’t it be amazing to go down to your local pub, sip your drink of choice and hear a talk about your favorite scientific subject from world famous experts? Well, you should have gone to the Pint of Science festival!
The journey to initiate Pint of Science festival began with a much smaller event I organized with Dr. Praveen Paul and colleagues to bring patients to our neuroscience labs at Imperial College London. It was part of a self-development course I took and it changed how I perceive these ventures.
I used to be very cynical about public engagement events. I thought if it’s not a business it’s not worth investing my time. Not that I had a business or I was extremely busy, I was simply afraid to take the risk to fail in enrolling the people around me to my idea.
Once I saw this clearly, the cynicism was gone. I had the mental clearing to actually start doing something I thought should be done. I had to stop watching other people’s actions while taking the role of the educated critique. It’s dead boring and there are millions who do it anyway.
Bringing science to the pub(lic)
As a scientist I often criticized the way science is presented on TV and in science magazines, often without the personal touch of the scientists themselves.
So I thought, how can we give the opportunity to the general public to ask world experts in genetics about how knowing my DNA sequence will change my life style, or why do we sleep and how drugs affect our brain? The obvious answer for me was ‘let’s bring them to the pub to give scientific talks’.
Often when you start something, you will hear a lot ‘but there are already people doing it’. It’s very true. Most things you would think of doing other people have done before. Pint of Science was not born out of thin air. There are the Skeptics, Cosy Science, Café Scientific, Mada al habar (Israel); all are fantastic events to hear professors present their science. But none of them did it in the form of a science festival.
If you’ve ever been to a music festival you know it’s quite different from a gig. The choice is massive, the buzz is thrilling! This is what I wanted to create. A science festival where anyone can choose the subject that inspires them. It could be genetics, artificial intelligence, drugs or stem cells. These people pay for our research from their tax money. They should know much more about it and get involved in it.
Growing into a national event
Praveen and I wanted to create a pull for the public but also for other universities to join us. So we enrolled and recruited from the top five universities in our region: Imperial College, King’s College, University College London, Cambridge University and Oxford University.
Then it was crucial to think of a way to get people on board but not to micro-manage them. Often the people organizing the event will do much better job if they own the event. So we gave them an outline of how we envisage it with slides and two talks per evening and we emphasized that they had the freedom to alter the format and bring anything that in their opinion would make it more fun.
They owned their event and we focused on providing the perfect platform. We worked on the website, publicity, contacting the universities, funding and admin to make sure they would have anything they needed. It worked brilliantly. We had 15 teams from five universities organizing 45 events with about 90 speakers and hosting 2,500 people for science talks. And next year we are going to become a national festival, across the UK!
What was amazing that almost none of us had organized anything like this before. We learned during the making of it. The teams were incredible and when I went into a venue and watched the talks, it was their night. Just the way we wanted it, they owned their event!
This wouldn’t be possible without the incredible commitment of the festival organizers who co-founded this festival. Now with all the contacts and the confidence we can organize such a massive event, starting up a business seems much easier.
So, what are you going to take on?
Michael Motskin is the president and co-founder of the Pint of Science festival. He has a PhD in nano-biology from the University of Cambridge, and is now based at Imperial College London investigating how carbon nano tubes interact with the blood brain barrier.