I’m going to SpotOn 14, with free badges!

UPDATE: I’ve had a parenting emergency so can’t make it for the Friday sessions 🙁

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: Parenting emergency dealt with so I’m heading down today! Yay!

This weekend (Friday 14th and Saturday the 15th) I’m going to be in London attending SpotOn 14.

SpotOn is a cool little conference hosted at the Wellcome Trust in London and organised by Nature. Its main focus is Science Communication and how to do it better. Talks and discussions range from how to share things more easily, to the ethics of sharing work. Basically, if you ever wondered about something in SciComms, SpotOn is the place to go to talk about it.

It’s a two day event with a mix of keynote sessions and discussion panels. The format tends to be very relaxed and is aimed at hearing a wide range of ideas on various subjects rather than just preaching the best practice (spoiler: we don’t generally know what that is).

I have several jobs at the moment but I’m attending SpotOn as both a Post-Doc who is trying to help his department get a fledgling outreach program off the ground, and also as someone who’s been blogging pretty consistently for 2 years. I’m hoping to share some of my hard earned experience in getting engagement and readers *waves* but also pick up some advice on how to deal with some of the harder ethics issues that affect my Post-Doc work.

Oh and I’m also attending as a person who has a giant bag of free badges to give out to anyone who asks! I’ll be wearing a very special @MCeeP badge of my own, so if you see me around just rugby tackle me to the ground and demand badges.

BTW, this year SpotOn is FREE making it all the more awesome. So if you can get to London it’s well worth making the time for… if only for the cool free badges I can give you 😀