Meteor

We had a come-to-reality moment and concluded that what the world needs right now is not another scicomm podcast episode from us. So, we are pausing what would be our next season of Meteor, indefinitely. 

We have several reasons for this decision, which we discuss in this brief episode: 

• Our most reliable, trusted communities are tighter in scope and focus, and we’re especially prioritizing spending time sustaining those connections right now. 
• We do not want to just join the pundit discourse about what’s happening in the world. Talking about the state of scicomm via the podcast just doesn’t feel like concrete action. 
• A support course or coaching process around social justice and collective action would probably help us all, but the two of us don’t need to create that. Many, many valuable resources to this effect already exist. 
• Social change and reciprocal communities/relationships require that we embrace knowing that the work takes all kinds of efforts and people doing all kinds of roles. (And that we divest from the toxic notion that we must, as one person, do all the roles.) In other words: we feel like we need to fill other roles than “podcaster” right now. 

The book Bethann mentions in this episode is Deepa Iyer’s Social Change Now workbook (socialchangemap.com). It helps identify lots of social change roles, emphasizes how important it is that people fill all sorts of roles, and underscores that we should not try to fill every role on our own. 

Take good care, fellow scicomm folks! 

Thanks for your support over the past 4 years! If you’d like to connect, you can reach us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org.

As we both hit our 40s, we’re embracing the “lost all our f*cks” part of aging. That means we’re crying, we’re snacking, and we’re eye-balling this season’s wrap-up questions from a little different angle. 

So, join us as we consider: 

• Do mid-career scicomm pros need an assistant? What would we have someone do, do we want to spend our personal money on that, and the like?
• What are our favorite tools for managing groups and group projects?  Including some maybe-uncommon ways of using Google Drive plus Bethann’s secret, vintage comms weapon. 
• How can we convince people they are an expert and it’s okay to act like one? (Or, should you just tell ‘em they need therapy!?) 
• What are we looking forward to, and how completely are we committed to being feisty this year? 

Then, we ask you to dig in for yourself: what’s something you’re looking forward to, personally or professionally? 

Thanks for listening! We’re hoping for a community potluck 🥗🍛: Connect with us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Twitter, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org. 

P.S. If you missed it, we’re going to try something new next season —  guests!!! Deets here if you want to join. And, if anyone listening reading has funding to help us compensate guests, please let us know!

Doesn’t “in it together” mean…scicomm groups? Isn’t that obvious? 

Well…actually. Scicomm community is not the only community or type of relationship that helps us be good, beyond-beginner scicommers. 

So, we talk this week about OTHER spaces and relationships that serve us as whole humans: 

• Not everyone needs a big network to thrive. “You don’t have to have twenty best friends in public.” 
• Scicomm isn’t the be-all, end-all. 
• What we say no to gives us space to be people, not scicomm robots. (Find Bethann’s No-buddy blog post here: https://www.commnatural.com/post/get-yourself-a-no-buddy) 

Then, we ask you to dig in for yourself: what’s a non-scicomm community or relationship that helps you feel like a full person? 

Thanks for listening! We’re hoping for a community potluck 🥗🍛: Connect with us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Twitter, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org. 

P.S. If you missed it, we’re going to try something new next season —  guests!!! Deets here if you want to join. And, if anyone listening reading has funding to help us compensate guests, please let us know!

We vaguely talk all the time on this podcast about what we do and where we work. But, we don’t talk concretely about the specific projects we work on, which ones we love, and what makes them hard. 

Plus, we talk all the time about saying no, and sometimes saying yes. So, today, we’re focusing on some things we actually said yes to. 

Today, we cover: 

• Virginia’s role as Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of the ocean tech start-up Tini Scientific (https://www.tiniscientific.com/). 
• Bethann’s excitement about being principal investigator on a recently funded grant from the National Science Foundation. 
• How Virginia’s free, monthly coaching calls didn’t start out as a community, but have turned into something of one. 
• Bethann’s nerdery and frustration and loyalty because …it’s her department! And she’s in charge of the department’s assessment work, which involves curricular overhauling to reflect their visioning and branding. 

It feels GOOD to gush. We rant and talk about the bad things and what all needs fixing A LOT on this podcast. Doing that is essential for making a difference. But, we have to remember that there are good things happening too. That can keep us connected to our core motivations for doing this work. It can also help us remember that we do do work that matters, and that work actually does make a difference. (The opposite of that  —  convincing yourself nothing you do matters  — is a recipe for burnout, y’all.) 

Then, we ask you to dig in for yourself: what’s a scicomm project you’re working on —  with a community aspect  —  and why are you excited about it? (We really mean it on this one; please tell us!!) 

Thanks for listening! We’re hoping for a community potluck 🥗🍛: Connect with us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Twitter, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org. 

P.S. If you missed it, we’re going to try something new next season —  guests!!! Deets here if you want to join. And, if anyone listening reading has funding to help us compensate guests, please let us know! 

We are building, maintaining & running facilitated settings/communities. It’s different to work hard to make a safe, productive scicomm community space (vs. just showing up and glorying in such a space). These spaces don’t just happen. 

This week, we tackle what it feels like to be that someone who has to step up…and what’s possible, in a good way, when we do step up! 

• Moderation and leadership aren't just the fun stuff. 
• And, ain’t it tricky when you’re co-running things, or only running part of a thing? 
• And….what happens when WE are the ones who need course correcting!? 🫠 
• But also, even if you’re on the greatest team, how do you balance democracy with efficacy when you're making decisions? 

However you answer these questions, we decide that doing the hard work is what makes a community worth joining. 

Then, we ask you to dig in for yourself: What’s an aspect of managing or running a community that you find challenging…yet still rewarding? 

Thanks for listening! We’re hoping for a community potluck 🥗🍛: Connect with us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Twitter, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org. 

P.S. If you missed it, we’re going to try something new next season —  guests!!! Deets here if you want to join. And, if anyone listening reading has funding to help us compensate guests, please let us know! 

We find we have predictable periods of “now what”, with the podcast, Meteor, as well as in our own, separate professional endeavors. And we’re trying to embrace these cycles as one of the indicators that we are in an advanced stage of our scicomm careers. 

The symptoms of our identity crises depend on our circumstances, like: 

• the cadence of our evaluation cycles (say, annual reports for a grant or a supervisor) 
• our workload (sometimes all freelance clients want everything at the same time!) 

and may display in recognizable ways, like an itch to update our websites, change our profile pics everywhere, or overhaul our bios. 

While we used to anchor ourselves first by asking whether we were doing the things that meet (external) expectations, now we’re asking: how does this work serve our communities or this stage in our careers? 

Then, we ask you to dig in for yourself: What are you trying to decide in your scicomm life right now, and what sort of reflection questions do you use to navigate that decision? 

Thanks for listening! We’re hoping for a community potluck 🥗🍛: Connect with us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Twitter, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org. 

P.S. If you missed it, we’re going to try something new next season —  guests!!! Deets here if you want to join. And, if anyone listening reading has funding to help us compensate guests, please let us know!

Genuine community and relationships make everything else possible. You want to change something? You can’t change it alone. You want someone to whisper-network vouch for you? As we said in the last episode, you don’t build professional community and relationships by lurking. 

But that’s not all of it. There are a *lot* of payoffs to having strong professional ties. 

In the interests of being (overly) honest, this week we asked ourselves: what’s the hidden curriculum of the success we’ve had in scicomm? 

And…it’s COMMUNITY!!! 

But, what’s that actually look like? 

This week, we tell you exactly what kinds of good things have come from having strong professional relationships. (And we ponder the downsides of the amount of time, effort, and perhaps money that it may take to build these relationships.) 

For example, we cover: 

• Working with other people who care about the same effort/outcome/change can keep you going (in good ways and…also…maybe unsustainable ways). 
• The material benefits and credibility that can come from working with/inside a given professional community and having strong relationships therein. 
• How belonging in more than one professional community can facilitate code-switching that you can leverage for professional growth. 

Then, we ask you to dig in for yourself: What’s the hidden curriculum that you think is responsible for your success in scicomm? 

Thanks for listening! We’re hoping for a community potluck 🥗🍛: Connect with us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Twitter, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org. 

P.S. If you missed it, we’re going to try something new next season —  guests!!! Deets here if you want to join. And, if anyone listening reading has funding to help us compensate guests, please let us know! 

Today, we're doing the big sister thing and sharing some straight-up advice: 

• Lists of a lot of the places where we find (or are aware of) scicomm communities, especially online 
• Recommendations on how not to be a creep (just in case you need to pass that advice along 😏) 
• How important it is to actually get involved, not just hang-around on the fringes of these communities 

We also get real honest: you have to interact with people and build relationships if you’re going to feel like you have found a scicomm community where you belong. Lurking ain’t working. 

Then, we ask you to dig in for yourself: What’s a scicomm community that you are in and want to gush about, or one that you’re working your way into? 

Thanks for listening! We’re hoping for a community potluck 🥗🍛: Connect with us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Twitter, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org. 

P.S. If you missed it, we’re going to try something new next season —  guests!!! Deets here if you want to join. And, if anyone listening reading has funding to help us compensate guests, please let us know!

Generosity is about a lot more than just money. We pondered this reality from a few points of view. And we found ourselves thinking through a lot of questions. 

For example: 

• Is it possible to think about being generous with time separately from money? 
• Is it possible to scale our impact while still protecting our professional (and thus personal) time? 
• In what ways can we extend to other people the same assumption we grant ourselves — that we’re all trying to be a “good guy” — and what are the mutual benefits of doing so? 
• What kinds of expert knowledge, processes, network connections, and/or materials do and don’t we share..and why? (And what differences here should we be scrutinizing wrt how individual scicommers/trainers operate vs. the big scicomm organizations?) 

Bottom line: Generosity doesn’t always have to focus on financials. So, how else can we create abundance, together, beyond the bounds of money? 

Dig in for yourself: What’s a non-montetary form of generosity that you practice professionally? 

Thanks for listening! We’re hoping for a community potluck 🥗🍛: Connect with us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Twitter, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org.

P.S. If you missed it, we’re going to try something new next season —  guests!!! Deets here if you want to join. And, if anyone listening reading has funding to help us compensate guests, please let us know!

First, we have a big announcement!

We’ve not previously opened the show to guests because we can’t monetarily compensate anyone for being on the podcast (even ourselves). But, we’ve heard from people that y’all would like to join the convo anyway. So, let’s do this! If you want to join the possible guest pool for next season, visit meteorscicomm.org/podcast. And, if anyone listening has funding to help us compensate guests, please let us know! 

Now, on to today’s episode! 

We’re kicking off SEASON 4!! 🥳 

We’ve been hearing from you, listeners, for four years now. Together, we’ve gone from advanced how-to’s to hope is an action to systemic change, and we love feeling like we’re really in this together. So, this season’s theme is “We’re in this together, now what!?” 

Today, we're taking a look at the risk there is, in the scicomm field, to see everything (and everyone) as competition, as a limit on what’s possible. This scarcity mindset dominates when we perceive a scarcity of resources. The tricky thing is, we’re often operating in situations where there are  — actually  — plenty of resources! It’s just a question of how we (or folks in charge, when it’s not us) choose to allocate those resources. 

All of this leads to some real potential for issues among scicomm professionals and organizations. 

For example, we think: 

• Environments with loads of resources are actually more likely to foster a scarcity mindset. 
• There are individual, institutional, and systemic points of responsibility (and opportunity!) to change these attitudes to be more oriented toward abundance and generosity. 

As always, on this “overly” honest podcast, we talk through several examples in our personal and professional lives. 

Then, we ask you to dig in for yourself: 

• What’s a shift toward abundance that you could make in your mindset or habits around the scicomm community/profession? 

Thanks for listening! We’re hoping for a community potluck 🥗🍛: Connect with us on social media (BlueSky, LinkedIn, Twitter, various Slack communities, etc.) or at www.meteorscicomm.org.