SciOut18 Flash Talk: Ben Wiehe
https://rockedu.rockefeller.edu/new_outreach/flash-talk-ben-wiehe/

Yes please, applause. Thank you! My money's on Susan by the way, if you're duking it out. But so boy I okay my name's Ben Wiehe, I'll start there. I work at the MIT Museum and my title, my job title is manager of the Science Festival Alliance. That's been my job title since 2009. It's hard to I kind of want to like just cede my time to Lou because you know I found it fantastic to listen her. I have deep respect for her. I have worked see you know I've been adjacent to her for a while now and she knows things and I don't know that I'm not sure that's why I was asked to stand in front of you. Because when when Lou speaks about this you know she has answers for your questions and I think I'm just here to be sort of like the curmudgeon who says it's a hot mess, don't do it. So I have like four different versions of what I was going to say. I've really struggled with this because it's sort of been my life for quite a while to be near the center of gravity of something that looks like I wouldn't call it community practice. It's called the Science Festival Alliance. We were intentional with that name so so I have either not much to say or just way too much. 

Quick quick so basically I have come down to just like well then I'll just make it all about me so I'm gonna just tell you a little bit about my trajectory as the Science Alliance manager, my perspective on the practicalities which i think is like the code for like the hard parts and the messy parts. So the Science Festival Alliance started as a with an NSF grant so we came out of the gates with a concept that was around a particular format of a festival for the I'm not going to get into what festivals are etc they're of, for, by the community. They're massive celebrations regional celebrations of science. If you've ever been to any festival think of that, now make it for science. We had some we had this clear format. We had a three million dollar grant. We had the structure was already there who was going to be working on this they we had somebody with a job title that was supposedly gonna manage the Alliance part. We had these guiding principles but they weren't very prescriptive; it was meant to be open-ended. You know every community needs to figure out what it is to celebrate science, so it wasn't about stamping out a product. We had multiple full-time equivalents working on the project at four different institutions. We had big travel budgets and meeting budgets. Even with all of this I remember being I just feeling so under-resourced which sounds ridiculous you know three million dollars and all these people working on these incredible institutions with advocates at the highest echelons of science. But we've assembled we quickly assemble the machine to get three festivals up and running: Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, but others were already wanting in or at least they thought they did. They're kind of in some we still have this challenge of like we're not science fairs we're science festivals. That was like even that is where we should were starting. Those early years were all consuming. That's a phrase I was like well if I was to sum it up it was all consuming. I just felt like we had a very brief window of opportunity. We had the potential of this attention seizing moment, we had this three-year grant, I was hired six months and it had already bled out six months when I was hired and ostensibly the thing started, so I and a few others just threw ourselves completely into this in a frenzy and I remember thinking this is insane! Why am I at the White House right now? What is that? What is happening? We we're building something and once it's built then we're gonna have this thing and we're gonna be able to do so many exciting things with it. So at the end of three years we had done something right. We had we had something like a dozen festivals that we could count as sort being in the fold whatever that meant, we had done our best to maximize attention, we had you know like New York Times coverage, USA Today, we had incredible images from the festivals so we had this like repository to help tell our story. We had eyebrow-raising evaluation results and we had eye watering anecdotes; just the most touching, moving, passionate stories and we had zeal. We were zealots about this but even with all that like suddenly I'm faced with like the most uncertain time. Were the festival is going to continue to be of interest? What was going on? Is this just some like weird passing fad? Would the best support for them be to like really pour effort into like building out a network or community practice or whatever? But is this thing - and oh by the way that funding clock is really close to alarm bells going off, meaning and when that goes off the whole thing just unravels. Okay so we need to get, yeah so we need to get the funding. Who would get that funding? Where would it come from? And we didn't really talk about it much but underlying all this who owns this thing anyways? Put that aside don't deal with that. So 2012 after all this effort and throwing not just myself but several people putting all they had into this, it was a very difficult year. While it was supposed to be crowning like we've done this like high fives all around, there are so many meetings as we tried to sort out internally what the Science Festival Alliance was, what it should be, how to realistically make the most of its potential. Key personnel were leaving, some personalities were proving problematic and needed to be I'll say managed out. It's so hard for, I'm kind of a nice guy, I don't know. I'm not conflict averse but it's just I you know I don't want to tell you but yes. The the amazing relationships that we built up were growing precarious and you know one little learning point, the best relationships are created under extreme duress. And we had gone through that Crucible there but these were people who are very action-oriented, all about taking action on a grand grand scale and they all had except for me festivals of their own churching away. Like they're like hey we've got 40,000 people coming to this location next Sunday so like sitting down to talk about what the Science Festival Alliance might be and where we might be headed as a group don't really have time for that and so your meetings are becoming a little bit boring and and you know I was I remember worrying that I was losing traction as a manager if I even was a manager and that the whole thing was really you know it's coming possibly to loose ends. I distinctly remember thinking, and maybe this is a Lou moment, that the problem was at that time our real constraints were forcing a top-down approach to issues that would be much better addressed from the bottom up and part of that was a draft after a draft after a draft of a potential NSF bid was piling up on my desk. We had these competing visions. We tried putting working committees in place. We tried to I think the uncertainty made some people anxious enough we try to formalize things with strategic plans a membership program but this just led to more items needing consensus. Consensus sometimes is lowest common denominator. One person even went so far as to draft a constitution that would govern the Science Festival Alliance. I mean we're just kind of like grasping at these things. I found an old file cabinet on campus and dragged it physically down the sidewalk to my office to put next to my desk which was a door that I had flipped over on its side in 2009 because I only had three years here anyways. Through all this, the phone calls with festivals are still going on. New festival organizers really want to talk about these conversations that we had three years ago and the older festival organizers have completely new set of issues that they want to talk about and in the midst of all this I find myself going to Cairo with state department funding that supposed to be generating a Science Festival Alliance in the Middle East during the Arab Spring and I'm like what why did that happen? Well because you know because they're there basically I couldn't let any opportunity go by. Like I had to seize everything. All right well we got the NSF grant. We asked for three million they said two. So that was a little bit painful because we worked on this thing. We didn't just put three in because it was a cap. We wanted more! At the same time we got our first major grant from a private foundation. I hired Julie Foucher and I built her a desk in similar style to mine because we only could count on having her for two years but now things this is all looks like really good news right I mean now 2012 well that was painful but boy 2013 this is gonna be amazing. Except there's no excuses, the funding clocks even tighter now and I mean basically it's just like alright well now it's time to throw everything I have into this project again like I was just doing I'm just gonna up that. I felt like I'd never been busier. We went from 11 festivals to 30 in a year's time and we put a real membership thing in place. It was light and I don't know if it makes everybody happy but we have it. The new members have like a really different needs than the old guard of festivals that have been around for a whole two or three years and we had staff at eight institutions around the country remunerated in some way to work on this network which you think is incredible. It really was so heartening to see people do this especially because like ask the you know I'm just gonna do that air quote thing sorry "manager" of this that I was my job title mmm but I mean none of these people actually reported to me or to anyone else that was responsible in some way for the project so soft power is all I had and I don't know that that could even be call it that. So as things grow at this crazy pace, it layers up different expectations of how I should be spending my time. I had to go silent on some relationships simply out of like saying like I have to rely on that to be there and soon I had people saying what do you even do anymore? I'm like I've been so busy that's why we haven't talked but I realized that I was not you know not documenting sufficiently not getting you know there there's these these shortfalls as it just piled up and became overwhelming. And now we're like 8 million dollars later, going into our 10th year, and we've involved we've evolved in so many ways and festivals like I don't have to explain that they're not science fairs anymore. I mean we achieved that and the things that I've seen like and now my burden is in part like I want to grab everybody by the lapels and be like "do you know what's happened out there" because we haven't as much as we've tried to capture it it we never really you know can convey this heart moving experiences that are happening in communities across the United States. It seems like we've you know we we recently had a just last weekend had a lunch with a couple people and we were just congratulating ourselves rightly so because just kind of tried to take a moment to do that and well later that afternoon I got some, my phone's ringing right now, but like later that afternoon like I got these I got a couple emails from two festivals that were like worried about the the behavior of another festival and the next day I had two financial reports due and those are now overdue and I also was laying out the application process to bring 12 new festivals into the network and I was just like wow we're I'm right back where I remember thinking to myself I'm at this spot I've got like two or three years of funding right now and I just need to throw everything I have into this next window of opportunity where like because now is the time when like that these things are we're gonna build something at the end of this three years it's gonna be so incredible. So I think I'll just leave it at that that's a practice. I don't know if that's helpful to anyone. Hi Ben. You know I know you You've watched this insanity unfold. So one of the things that just sounds so familiar and I'm sure it is to Jeanne and a bunch of people is like where we have good examples of communities of practice or organizations it often feels like there is one or a small number of individuals who are basically like burning the candle at six ends and they're soon gonna drop down and have a heart attack or in practice what actually happens is... My doctor says it's because my three-year-olds really heavy and it's like muscle it's not my heart. Yep. So I'm okay. My doctor just laughs. But so in fact people don't have heart attacks people as you said they leave because it's totally dynamic yeah always changing um so I guess, partly for you partly for Lou, like what happens when people suddenly decide they don't want to die at 34 from well cardiac arrest? Well, I'm not so, I'm pretty okay with like putting my ego aside on this. Like I don't think that I'm the essential ingredient that makes all anything happen as I say all this not only just anything at all but there are key moments in the development of this where I felt okay I like my job I just want to say that I do and and I'm really I love the experience that I've had over the past 10 years with this project and there are other projects that I also work on which is you know that's another thing is that many of the people involved in this that are you're totally depending on it's completely not their job at all. But I definitely have felt like there are many many moments where I felt like trapped a little bit. Not trapped in uh like I want to get out but like oh if I did want to get out I'm not sure I could without things kind of feeling like they might implode a little bit. I don't know how to reinforce that. We've put together these you know at various times when the anxiety built and was really palpable we put together different kinds of structures to deal with it at that moment; most recently there was a Science Festival Alliance Council and I thought if I call it a council not a committee it would feel like something that you know had more responsibility and people are enthusiastic about it, but it's sort of like you know it served a purpose for a couple years and then like we had our summit in this past June and we decided yeah we don't really need to meet the council that you know I think we did that served its purpose. So I you just kind of like create organizational structures for the demands of the moment and the demands at the moment can be really fleeting. I'm glad we didn't adopt the Constitution. Essentially if you do end up successfully building a I would say so and echo the first thing that Ben said, which is that essentially, if you do end up successfully building a community, the idea is that the roles and responsibilities are shared. You know if we actually build this together no one person ought to be the weakest link. We think about this a lot from the perspective of community management so I didn't mention this in my talk but after you know when we set up these communities there is somebody who is designated in that role of coalescing folks together, greasing the wheels, ensuring you know that we remember to reconvene, that we do the things that we do and that role evolves over time. You know, if your community is healthy and it's actually progressing through a life cycle and through to stages of maturity, then the pressure should ease on that community manager and yes they're still doing a job but everything should you know the success or failure of that community should not depend on the people convening it solely. And another thing that this gets at that I just also want us to bear in mind, this echoes what Jeanne was saying earlier about acknowledging all the support staff that makes things happen, this this role of convening communities is a is an invisible leadership role right. It's not about one person or a group of people standing up and saying hey here's what I think we should do and we're gonna be the ones that make sure it all gets done all the time and so you know everybody being aware of the fact that there there is value being created there even if this is not leadership in a very front-and-center way I think is important. It might be helpful to point out that I don't I mean I do often times quip that I don't do anything and by that I mean I don't actually organize a festival of myself. I don't have skin in that game. My job is to, not like some godlike figure, but like pull myself up out and look over out across the landscape so I have some feeling for where the center of gravity of the group be and I can look after those that like aren't maybe aren't don't have the same power in the in the community. Kishore can tell the same story. I know this story well. Hi, I'm Kishore. I get that it was hard. I know it was hard because I was in some of those stories you were telling. I did not make that constitution. I did not. I was not part of the constitution. I vetoed the constitution. We're aligned in that. I get that it was really hard. Was it worth it? Yeah absolutely I mean it's worth it even in the even at moments when I thought it was all gonna collapse because of something some foolish thing that I had neglected. It was still worth it. Yeah absolutely. I mean it's it really helps that we all work in a field that is so inspiring. I mean it's just inspiring. The product, our product is inspiring if it's it ought to be and so that really helps I mean the festivals are absolutely amazing and the thing that yeah so I could talk about that I think that that's in the end like I mean it's just there's this like infinite wellspring of passion for just keeping this going and spreading it because it's so inspiring to me. It's not a question, it's probably not a comment, but listening to you, when you said you had a hard time, it just made the feelings that I was getting in the last couple of days even deeper. Most of us are working in much smaller programs and of how this this weekend of great gorgeous programs they will all die when the guy who or women who's doing it will leave. They can't even have advice person to do it because they don't have funding. They put their heart and soul into it and as soon as they leave it will die. In your story which is a great success story it's just making it even more apparent is it if you don't have an organization of 12 people and you don't have funding and you put in your summer salary into doing the summer camp it's gonna die when you leave and how how do we make it sustainable? I've got so many problems that were just well dying. Well, I mean partly it is also just sort of isn't the also the nature of everything that we do is is just very fleeting like I mean and dynamic? Isn't like it this work it just never will never end is another way to flip that around. Well the festivals I mean we've been very lucky but the festival is not exactly brick-and-mortar. They can just did not a year goes by when I'm not having a crisis conversation with some festival organizer about like I don't know if how we're gonna do it this year. So I it I think there's something about like this for example this meeting, I know a lot of people that are here. I've met a lot of people. I've had a lot of inspiring conversations and great conversations here. I there's not been enough time. I wish that this will keep going. But at the same time a lot of the conversations here mirror conversations I've had at other meanings. This is the fourth meeting I've been to in two weeks and and I've seen a lot of people at this meeting at those other meetings those other meetings are helpful but this why would this meet again well because we continue to have we live in a dynamic situation with new members can come and go the issues that the community's trying to address are going to continually be evolving so it's it's sort of like you know I've just coming to peace with the knowledge that like I'm not a construction worker. Like I don't build a building and then go like right there it is and that's gonna last there for generations or 35 years is the current standard actually. But so we work in a different like softer, are the product of our work is this softer than that and it just needs constant attention so if a program dies I I don't sorry I couldn't hear that There's also part of me that like is another side to that - sorry just like keep finding silver linings or way to reframe that positively - is now I'm no longer a curmudgeon - is that the if you look at our historical I mean if taking a more historical stance on the world would do the entire United States a world of good. So looking just a little bit back, you can see first of all you can see enormous improvement and evolution in positive directions. But you can also just like talk to a real old timer and you start to hear like oh yeah that's just like that thing we did in 1984 and that thing in there was member that in the 70s we had this other program that that was just so amazing and so you know with the festivals people there's some people get really fixated on origin stories especially those who think that they are the origin and part of my job is to poke holes in that. I actually it's not my job it's my personality is its to poke holes in those kinds of that notion because you know my god where the science festivals come from who started this thing and my reply is not meant to be facetious but like I say I kind of peg it to like maybe dawn of agriculture. To put it there comfortably that like people have been coming together to celebrate how technology and knowledge makes them who they are. That's let's put it let's put it you know there's like World's Fairs and all that but I just go way back this is and it's a natural human endeavor this is. We've been doing this for forever. Hi, I'm Amanda Smith. I was asked to speak about 100k in 10. First of all, I'm from Penn State's Center for Science in the schools and I'm the representative for the university and 100k in 10, if you're not aware of it, is an or national organization that has about two hundred and fifty members of it so far and they're always growing but they have a really nice structure where they've divided into project teams to tackle varying issues across STEM education and outreach. Talia, the CEO, was supposed to be here today but couldn't be, but if you'd like to find out more information I'm always happy to share it on the Slack channel and give you more information. But the structure is really nice because it can't just take one person to manage all of it. It's going to take a village and how they've divided project teams has been really really nice and they've spent a lot of time mapping out the Grand Challenges in STEM education and it's it's public now and it's called I believe it's called like grandchallenges.100kin10.org but they're really looking at all the issues of getting highly qualified over a hundred thousand qualified STEM ready educators by the next ten years and so 2022 is the date that they're up and they were originally funded by the Obama administration and the Clinton initiative also funds them heavily as well. But I think it's a definitely a great organization to look at as far as structure and how we might be able to fold in and to learn more about those Grand Challenges and maybe where does science outreach also fold into that dynamic as well.