Help Scienceogram write to parliament
Would you like to influence UK government science policy? Scienceogram wants your input on our submission to a parliamentary inquiry into research funding.
We’re making a submission to the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee. The Committee is a group of MPs tasked with scrutinising government policy across a range of scientific topics, and it’s currently conducting an inquiry into the Science Budget.
This process is especially important right now with the upcoming Spending Review assessing investment in all programmes across government: as we recently blogged, present policy would see a significant decline in the Science Budget.
Our overarching message is simple: the government needs to make more Scienceogram-like comparisons between research investment and the socioeconomic benefits of science.
We have now closed our submission for comments and suggestions, and submitted it to the inquiry. Thanks to everyone who contributed!
To communicate this as effectively as possible, and to ensure we’re using the best available evidence, we thought we’d do an experiment: we’re making the first draft of our submission available to our supporters and the wider online community for your comments and suggestions.
If you’d like to contribute to our submission, there are two different ways to do so:
- A Google Document to which anyone can add comments or suggest edits. If you want to ensure consistent attribution of your suggestions, please make sure to sign in with your Google Account before making changes, otherwise they will appear as anonymous. You are of course very welcome to leave anonymous comments too!
- If you’re feeling a little more geeky, we’re also trying out a collaborative writing tool called Penflip. Visit our project page, edit your own copy, and then we can merge the changes back into the official Scienceogram version.
If you’re having any trouble with either platform, or have any other questions, please feel free to get in touch, or leave a comment below. We’d also be very interested to hear your thoughts about this idea, and feedback on either of the editing systems we’re trying out.
Thank you in advance for any comments or suggestions!
Useful information
- The terms of reference can be found on the inquiry website. We’ve not hit every one as they’re not all relevant to Scienceogram’s remit, but if you think we’ve missed something crucial do let us know.
- The suggested length for submissions is 3000 words. This draft is pretty much at that limit, so please bear that in mind when making suggestions!
- The deadline for written submissions is Wednesday 26th August 2015, so we’d like suggestions by 23:59 on Monday 24th August to give us time to incorporate them all. Our apologies for the short notice.