SAI-P: Exploring the Infrastructure Available to Scientists to Communicate Strategically

加强美国基础设施（SAI）是美国国家科学基金会的一个项目，旨在促进以人为本的基础研究和潜在的变革性研究，以加强美国的基础设施。有效的基础设施为社会经济活力和广泛的生活质量改善提供了坚实的基础。强大、可靠和有效的基础设施刺激私营部门的创新，发展经济，创造就业机会，使公共部门提供的服务更有效率，加强社区，促进机会平等，保护自然环境，加强国家安全，并推动美国的领导地位。为了实现这些目标，需要来自科学和工程学科的专业知识。SAI侧重于人类推理和决策、治理以及社会和文化过程的知识如何使有效的基础设施的建设和维护能够改善生活和社会，并以技术和工程的进步为基础。科学家面临着与各种各样的受众进行交流的日益增长的需求。通信专业人员提供了一个强大的基础设施来帮助解决这个问题，但是科学家往往缺乏对这个基础设施的实质性访问。科学家尤其缺乏接触专家的机会，这些专家可以帮助他们确定具体目标并确定优先级，然后制定实现这些目标的循证途径。这个SAI规划项目开始设计并优先考虑一系列综合项目，以支持科学界的传播需求。该项目更好地理解了为什么科学家很少使用战略沟通指导。它还开始开辟一条途径，使科学家能够更多地使用这类基础设施。改进对复杂通信基础设施的使用将支持向利益相关者、决策者和社会广泛传播科学发现，同时也提高科学家将其他社会成员的见解和优先事项纳入研究选择的能力。这个SAI规划项目为帮助科学界做出更多基于证据的、具有战略意识的传播选择奠定了基础，从而提高他们对社会的贡献。目前的科学传播基础设施可能会限制科学家获得战略传播指导的能力，原因有三。这些问题包括对战略建议的需求有限，对战略支持的资金有限，以及接触具有战略头脑的人员的机会有限。通过对科学家、实践者和科学传播专家的访谈，我们可以优先考虑在这个领域中哪些地方需要投入额外的研究重点，并设计未来的合作项目。通过将战略沟通视为科学基础设施的一种形式，SAI规划活动为加强和更好地利用资源奠定了基础，科学家可以在他们的研究背景下进行沟通，传播他们的见解并从他人的见解中学习。该奖项由社会、行为和经济科学理事会（SBE）支持。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.Scientists face increasing demands to communicate with a diverse range of audiences. Communication professionals offer a robust infrastructure to help with this, but scientists often lack substantive access to this infrastructure. Scientists especially lack access to experts who can help them identify and prioritize concrete goals and then develop evidence-based paths to achieving those goals. This SAI planning project begins to design and prioritize a set of integrated projects to support the communication needs of the scientific community. The project gains a better understanding of why scientists rarely use strategic communication guidance. It also begins to develop a path towards increasing scientists’ access to such infrastructure. Improved use of a sophisticated communication infrastructure will support broad dissemination of scientific discoveries to stakeholders, policy makers, and society while also improving scientists’ capacity to integrate other society members’ insights and priorities into research choices.This SAI planning project lays the foundation to help the scientific community make more evidence-based, strategy-minded communication choices to improve their contributions to society. Current science communication infrastructure may limit scientists’ ability to access strategic communication guidance for three reasons. These include limited demand for strategic advice, limited funding for strategic support, and limited access to strategy-minded people. Interviews with scientists, practitioners, and science communication experts are used to prioritize where within this landscape to put additional research focus and design future, collaborative projects. By thinking of strategic communication as a form of scientific infrastructure, this SAI planning activity lays the foundation for enhanced and better utilized resources with which scientists can communicate in the context of their research to both disseminate their insights and learn from the insights of others.This award is supported by the Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.