Cristina Luís and Inês Navalhas, from the NEWSERA team in Portugal, participated in the 10th Annual Congress on Science Communication – SciComPt 2022, which took place between 11 and 13 May 2022, in the island of São Miguel, Azores, Portugal.

During the course of the conference, Cristina Luís was interviewed by the radio programme Efervesciencia from Radio Galega: listen to the podcast here (skip to minute 9:46 for the segment with Cristina Luís).

During the SciComPt conference, Cristina Luís and Inês Navalhas gave a talk titled “Communication strategies in citizen science projects. A preliminary analysis” and animated the exhibition “NEWSERA co-creation labs: how to reach different stakeholders through citizen science?”, with the aim to recreate the NEWSERA co-creation Labs.

During the communication the citizen science projects followed by the NEWSERA team in Portugal were presented, explaining the various science communication strategies the projects decided to implement in order to reach their stakeholders. The main aim of the presentation was, however, to show the challenges and opportunities faced by the projects during this process, and what lessons can be learned from this experience. Overall this preliminary analysis showed that the challenges are transversal to all projects and mainly related to lack of funding, lack of time and lack of human resources.

During the exhibition the main objective was to mimic the dynamics followed during the Labs, which allowed projects to co-create communication strategies targeted at the 4-helix stakeholders. The team interacted with around 30 people during this activity and many participants were very interested in knowing more about the NEWSERA project and its methodologies.

Cristina Luís during her presentation at SciComPt.

Credits: Inês Navalhas