a community to share biodiversity science in twitter
Hi people! Thank you for visiting the repository of our project @Biodiversity in Focus. This document was built to give you the basic information about the project. You can jump directly to one of the sections below or just scroll down to keep reading about it.
The problem
Brazil is facing a setback in environmental policies and science funding as both are not priorities for the general public and current government. This is a historical issue in Brazil due to complex factors, and one of these factors is the low engagement of scientists with the general public and the low levels of education countrywide. Even when scientists are engaged in science communication (SciComm)and outreach activities, these are predominantly in local scale and based in an information deficit model. This generally occurs because scientists in Brazil do not experience a formal training for SciComm and quite often try to learn after graduate school in a trial and error learning basis.
The solution
@Biodiversity in Focus will set a social media platform where Brazil-based scientistics focused in biodiversity may share their experiences in research and their knowledge about biodiversity. In addition, account curation will be mostly performed by graduate students, which will be able to develop SciComm skills.
The founders of @Biodiversidade em Foco (@Biodiversity in Focus, in English) are Bruno Soares and Naraiana Benone. We are friends that worked in the same lab in UFPA in 2012. Since then, we are part of different research groups, but we keep working together. Both of our researches are focused in aquatic ecology. We also have two invited members: Romullo Lima and Lídia Seabra. They are graduate students in UFPA and UFRJ and also have their projects focused on aquatic ecology.
The development of this project is mentored by Renato Alves in Open Life Science.
We would love any feedback along our way to create this platform for SciComm. The account will be curated by different researchers every week. As we are focused in a Brazilian audience, we need curators that study speak portuguese and are primarily focused on Brazilian biodiversity.
If you can help in any of the above areas or anything we haven't thought, check our contributors' guidelines. We want to keep a safe and positive environment for everyone involved in the project, so we ask you to follow the code of conduct in all offline and online interactions you may have.
If you want to report a problem or give a suggestion, feel free to open an issue at the github repository. Issues will be readily taken into consideration. If you prefer, you can contact Bruno directly by email (soares.e.bruno@gmail.com) or by twitter.
