Report from European Particle Physics Communication Network
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CERN/SPC/1035 CERN/3141 Original: English 5 September 2014 ORGANISATION EUROPÉENNE POUR LA RECHERCHE NUCLÉAIRE CERN EUROPEAN ORGANIZATION FOR NUCLEAR RESEARCH Action to be taken Voting Procedure For Information SCIENTIFIC POLICY COMMITTEE - 289th Meeting 15 and 16 September 2014 COUNCIL SESSION For Information 172nd Session - 19 September 2014 REPORT FROM EUROPEAN PARTICLE PHYSICS COMMUNICATION NETWORK CERN/SPC/1035 1 CERN/3141 1. Overview This document covers the period August 2013 to July 2014. Major communications activities at CERN in this period include the award of the Nobel Prize in physics to François Englert and Peter Higgs, the Open Days of 28 and 29 September 2013, a continuing campaign of national media and press officer visits, and the beginning of the 60th anniversary celebrations. The success of the first TEDxCERN event has led to a second being prepared for September 2014 (http://tedxcern.web.cern.ch). Both EPPCN and IPPOG played important roles in the launch of a pilot Beamline for Schools competition, and are collaborating on organizing a FameLab CERN competition for 2015. EPPCN and IPPOG have been aligning their autumn meetings for a number of years. This year for the first time, they will be joined at CERN by the InterActions collaboration, which brings together communication officers from the world’s major particle physics laboratories and funding agencies. The Memorandum of Understanding between CERN and the host institutes of EPPCN members has been signed by 11 countries (see Annex 2). This has been put in place to formalise the network and provide members with a modest operational budget of 5kCHF/year to carry out network business. An important development at CERN this year has been the creation of the Stakeholder Relations Office (SRO). The SRO supports the Organization's strategic goals by engaging in dialogue with key stakeholder groups, both internal and external to the Organization. It identifies key stakeholder groups, analyses their needs and concerns, advises CERN management on engagement strategies and manages CERN’s relationship with these groups. The Stakeholder Relations Office consists of the Heads of Communication, Education, International Relations, and Relations with International Organizations. It serves a coordination role, with individual members reporting to the Director-General. This document gives a short report on highlights of the work of the CERN Communication and Education groups before moving on to reports of network activity by country. It will not cover the 2013 Open Days or the 60th anniversary events in detail since these are the responsibility of separate teams put together for the purpose and reporting independently to Council. 2. Status of the network The network welcomed Avital Baer, new network member from Israel, at its autumn meeting at CERN. The positions of network members from Belgium, Bulgaria, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey are vacant. The ApPEC seat on the network is currently vacant, though it is understood that ApPEC is working on a replacement. 3. Media report Implemented in 2013, the programme of national media visits continued to bring a significant number of journalists to CERN every month until April 2014, when the last group came for a standardized two-day-visit including tours of the experiments and the LHC tunnel, as well as meetings with scientists from the journalists’ or press officers’ countries of origin. Over the 13 months the programme ran, the CERN press office worked with EPPCN and other communications officers to welcome 27 national delegations comprising the most influential 2 CERN/SPC/1035 CERN/3141 commentators on science in their countries, making a total of 232 journalists representing 192 media. Although most of the visits have already resulted in positive immediate coverage, the main goal of the project was to invest in the relationship with journalists, in preparation for LHC run 2. Building on the success of the national media visit programme, the CERN press office organised similar visits for groups of university and institute press officers on request. France, Germany and the UK took up this offer. The level of requests for regular media visits shows that CERN remains in the spotlight. During the 12 months from August 2013 to July 2014, the CERN press office welcomed over 480 media outlets on-site. Coverage of CERN in the media remains plentiful and positive with over 1000 mentions per month. These are mostly ranked as neutral to positive, with negative coverage being rare. The CERN press office has been pro-active in leveraging events such as conferences and award announcements to generate positive coverage. The announcement of the Nobel Prize, supported by a well-attended press conference at CERN, resulted in a vast increase in coverage, with 4000 mentions in the first week. A press conference at the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF) in Copenhagen in June gave the opportunity to present the LHC restart to a large cohort of journalists and resulted in a 25% increase in the number of CERN mentions for the month. The production of daily briefings during the parallel sessions at ICHEP also found favour with the media and resulted in an increase in coverage in July. 4. Social media report CERN’s activities on social media gained recognition in 2013 with a Twiplomacy study1 from the leading communications agency, Burson Marsteller, naming CERN the most effective international organization on Twitter; CERN now has almost 1 million Twitter followers. 1 http://twiplomacy.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Twiplomacy_organisations.pdf CERN/SPC/1035 3 CERN/3141 The 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics announcement led to record levels of engagement on CERN’s Facebook page and coincided with the release of a CERN photo collection under the Creative Commons licence, enabling CERN images to be used consistently on Wikipedia. Live interactive videos on YouTube in English, French, German, Spanish and Italian, as well as a promotional video by American singer Will-i-am, helped ensure that hundreds of student teams worldwide entered the CERN Beamline for Schools competition. Hundreds more online hunters used Google Streetview maps of the CERN computing centre to hunt for hidden LEGO characters during the Christmas break. Through a Reddit Ask Me Anything, Google + Hangouts with CERN, collaborations with HR on LinkedIn and more, the CERN communication group continues to use social media as a vehicle to engage with the public on multiple levels to showcase CERN’s work and the diversity of CERN people. 5. Other activities organized by the CERN Communication group Other elements of the work of the CERN communication group that merit a mention include the on-going success of the 2013 edition of TEDxCERN. In addition to the live audience at CERN, some 10,000 people followed TEDxCERN remotely. The five educational animations created in collaboration with TED Ed have each been extensively viewed with the most popular achieving over 440,000 views. All have been used as lessons. The talks from TEDxCERN continue to be watched online, with the two most successful, those of Philosopher John Searle and CERN theorist Gian Giudice, each achieving over a million views with translations into many languages. In the light of this success, there will be a second edition of TEDxCERN in 2014, again sponsored by Rolex. Additional sponsors are also being sought. Details of the event can be found at http://cern.ch/tedxcern. Working with EPPCN and the InterActions collaboration, the CERN communication group has been successful in placing particle physics sessions at the world’s two largest public- facing science conferences, the annual AAAS meeting and the EuroScience Open Forum, which takes place every two years. In the most recent of these, the communication group contributed to sessions on the LHC and global planning in particle physics, as well as organizing a press conference to signpost the LHC restart. CERN personnel also took part in the opening ceremony, and there were sessions featuring CERN organized by EIROforum and the CERN KT group on medical physics. Other activities that benefited from EPPCN and IPPOG support include the pilot Beamline for Schools (BL4S) competition and CERN’s participation in the international FameLab competition, which identifies and trains young scientists with strong communication skills. EPPCN and IPPOG spread the word about the BL4S competition, while IPPOG members were active in mentoring teams preparing their submissions. Over 400 expressions of interest were received from around the world. This translated to some 300 complete submissions, of which 16 were presented to the SPSC for final selection. Two teams, one from Greece and one from the Netherlands, will come to CERN to carry out their experiments in September, coinciding with the Council meeting. In 2014, CERN facilitated the French and Swiss national FameLab heats. For the 2015 edition of the competition, CERN is working with EPPCN delegates to launch a FameLab CERN competition to find a young particle physicist to send to the International finals. NASA is also running a similar competition. 4 CERN/SPC/1035 CERN/3141 The communication group worked closely with the CERN crisis management team to implement a crisis communication plan, which has been successfully implemented in two simulation exercises. EPPCN is heavily involved in the 60th anniversary celebrations, notably because many of the national contacts for the anniversary are EPPCN delegates. A neighbourhood event was organized in May for people from the local communities, centred at the CMS site with visits to neighbouring sites. This met with considerable success, some 8000 people visited over the weekend, and contributed to developing CERN’s positive reputation in its host communities. A major change in CERN’s online communication will come later in the year with the deployment of the .cern top-level Internet domain. This will allow CERN to develop a more structured Internet domain space, while remaining in the vanguard of web development.