Dung Beetle Knockout, Jellyfish Disco & Festival I-Spy

Happy New Year!
2013 is going to be a really exciting year - it's the BES Centenary, the Festival of Ecology and the year we take the BES on the road to music festivals.
Just before Christmas, the roadies were at the BES Annual Meeting in Birmingham. The entire meeting was great (as always) but the standout event for us was our workshop on 'Creative Public Engagement'.
45 participants spent an hour of their lunch break thinking about how to engage people in ecology and brainstorming fun activities for the BES stall at festivals this summer. Helen lead the workshop with Ruth Murray from AtBristol (with token help from the other roadies) and we all brought a few random props to act as catalysts for ideas.
After a brief intro, Helen got everyone thinking hard about the most important aspect of successful public engagement: the audience.

Participants worked in groups to characterise their audience and think about how to get their attention; then everyone started brainstorming ideas for activities to engage festival-goers with ecology.

The workshop was short but the time pressure seemed to get everyone's neurons working overtime - we had some really fantastic ideas, including dung beetle gladiators, a festival I-Spy, a luminous jellyfish disco, a fossil-hunt and a whole load of interactive, hands-on displays on e.g. food-webs, pollinators, soil fauna, and photosynthesis.
We've captured the essence of the workshop in a short video clip. So if you missed it: here's the whole thing in 2 minutes flat http://youtu.be/Bau-W72uwKE

It all started down the pub...

It all started when the British Ecological Society (BES) announced that it was looking for public engagement and outreach activities to celebrate it's centenary in 2013. I had just been to a workshop where I heard about 'Einstein at Glastonbury' from 2005. I thought going to Glastonbury with a load of crazy ideas was possibly the coolest way you could engage the public with science - especially because doing hands-on science in the Glasto mud is possibly the best place to dispense with the image of the aloof white-coated brainiac in an ivory tower... So, next time I was down the pub and had had a couple of pints, I announced that I wanted to take the BES to Glastonbury to celebrate the Society's 100th birthday.

And it all developed from there. By the end of the evening, we had two pages of notes, ideas, and a title for the stall 'Sex and Bugs and Rock n Roll'. The team of roadies has also grown and we even have a member of the original 'Einstein' team on board.

Over the last few months we've been brainstorming and collecting ideas for activities, designing the stall (see Matt's excellent layout sketch below) and applying for funding. 

And today we took the plunge and put in our application for a stall at Glastonbury in 2013!

Fingers crossed...