Democratic Values and the National Forum on Science and Technology Goals

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9312150 Chapman Supplemented by complementary work funded by Rockefeller Family Associates, this planning project will begin to develop a process whereby a wide variety of public organizations can participate in a democratic dialogue about the aims of publicly funded scientific and engineering research and development and the establishment of a new National Forum on Science and Technology Goals. The idea for a Forum grew out of a recent proposal from an expert panel under the auspices of the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government. The National Academy of Sciences is now pursuing this idea. This project will contribute to these efforts, by focusing on the question of how to optimize democratic values such as diversity, representation, equity, access, and reasoned dissent within an institution such as the National Forum. This project involves representatives from a number of public organizations that are concerned about participation in science and technology policy making, in planning for broad-based meetings and related efforts to initiate that dialogue. In this planning period, the sponsoring organization and representatives from several others will assemble a diverse group of people interested in the National Forum. These people will meet in fall, 1993, to plan a larger, follow-on meeting and a process through which diverse constitutencies can be heard on the character, charter, and configuration of the National Forum. The planning meeting will identify persons and organizations to invite to the larger meeting and develop the content and structure for it. The planning group will consider and select case studies of successful public participation in deliberations about and resolution of science and technology issues to use at the larger meeting. The final plan will be presented in a report to the Ethics and Values Studies program of the National Science Foundation, and in proposals to public and private funding sources. ***