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

加强美国基础设施(SAI)是一项NSF计划，旨在刺激以人类为中心的基础性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创新，增长经济，创造就业机会，提高公共部门服务提供效率，加强社区力量，促进机会均等，保护自然环境，增强国家安全，推动美国的领导地位。要实现这些目标，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能够建立和维护有效的基础设施，以改善生活和社会，并建立在技术和工程进步的基础上。科学家面临着与不同受众交流的日益增长的需求。通信专业人员提供了强大的基础设施来帮助实现这一点，但科学家往往缺乏对这一基础设施的实质性访问。科学家尤其缺乏能够帮助他们确定具体目标并确定优先顺序的专家，然后制定以证据为基础的实现这些目标的途径。该SAI规划项目开始设计一套综合项目并确定其优先顺序，以支持科学界的通信需求。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。它还开始制定一条道路，以增加科学家获得此类基础设施的机会。改善对复杂通信基础设施的使用将支持向利益相关者、政策制定者和社会广泛传播科学发现，同时还将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。这一SAI规划项目为帮助科学界做出更多基于证据的、具有战略意识的通信选择奠定了基础，以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取战略传播指导的能力，原因有三个。这些问题包括对战略建议的需求有限，用于战略支持的资金有限，以及接触有战略头脑的人的机会有限。对科学家、实践者和科学传播专家的采访被用来确定在这一背景下将额外的研究重点放在哪里，并设计未来的合作项目。通过将战略传播视为一种形式的科学基础设施，这项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交流，以传播他们的见解并学习他人的见解。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NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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.