Do you want to work for Parenting Science Gang?

Are you bright, switched on, a fan of science projects that work with the public without patronising them, not repulsed by small children and up for working on a project that pushes the envelope of citizen science and what it can do?

Taken at a recent staff meeting. We support family-friendly working.

Parenting Science Gang is an innovative user-led citizen science project, funded by the Wellcome Trust. We will work with several parent groups to come up with their own research questions, and then, in discussion with scientists, design and run their own experiments to answer them.

The project will run for two years, engaging with 12 groups in all – mainly parenting groups on Facebook. It’s based on the approach we piloted with Nappy Science Gang

We have two jobs going on the project at the moment.

Closing date for both roles is 5pm on Friday 10th March. We will shortlist and telephone interview in the week commencing 13th March. The jobs will ideally start on Monday 20th March.

To apply, email Sophia Collins with your CV and a SHORT covering email, telling me why you’d be great for the job and one mistake you’ve made in your life that you learned something from.

 

Project co-ordinator (full time)

Employment details

• Full time (37.5 hours a week, with 28 days annual holiday)
• For 23 months
• Salary £22,750 pa
• Working remotely, with some travel (within the UK)
• We are a family-friendly project and if you have children or other caring responsibilities we will try to be as flexible as possible in making sure any travel or work plans accommodate that
• Line manager Sophia Collins

Duties

You will be the only full time member of staff (there are three other staff working one day a week) and so you will often be the first point of contact for many people, and responsible for a lot of the day-to-day running of the project. This will include:-

• Admining several facebook groups (with help from other staff and a Project Advisory Group of members and other stakeholders)
• Day-to-day admin (drafting monthly newsletter, responding to queries, contacting scientists and other experts, maintaining budget spreadsheets and contacts lists, ordering supplies, making up and posting experiment packs)
• Organising events (working with the rest of the team) – there will be two weekend-long workshops and one one-day workshop covering the whole project, with roughly 60 attendees.
• There may also be smaller ‘local’ events organised for some of the groups.
• Writing blogposts and maintaining website
• Evaluation – we are working with two absolutely brilliant evaluation consultants, but you will do a lot of the ‘nitty gritty’ evaluation – e.g. drafting surveys (in discussion with the consultants and the rest of the team), putting up surveys and posting them in the groups, number-crunching the quantitative answers, and so on. Formative evaluation will also include keeping note of ‘interesting’ things that happen in the groups, asking questions and listening to group members, in order to inform the ongoing project and how we do things.

What are we looking for?

Essential

• Intelligent and quick to grasp things
• Good communication and social skills – sensitivity to others, understand how to support and facilitate groups making decisions, help make sure everyone’s voice is heard and progress made towards decisions, without steering them too much.
• Get why we are doing this and what the point of the project is. Care about us helping parents and democratising science.
• Writing skills
• Organised

Desirable but not essential

• Experience working with online communities
• Experience with project evaluation (both formative and summative)
• Experience with writing and maintaining blogs (particularly WordPress)
• Science background
• Science communication/STS/sociology or other relevant experience or qualification

NB Read this!

The most important thing is, do you think this project is a good idea and do you want to help make it happen? If not, please don’t apply just because you need a job (mate, I know what it’s like, and I’ve been there, believe me), it will just waste your time and mine. For the right person, this job could be brilliant and rewarding, but for the wrong person it will just not make sense and seem like a really frustrating and inefficient way of doing research. At times, user-led citizen science takes a lot of work supporting groups, and involves a lot of repetition and discussions that go round in circles. But it’s amazing when you see volunteers gain skills and confidence and get really engaged with answering the questions that matter to them, using science.

You will have a lot of scope to influence the project and working with some of the best in the field, and liaising with some fantastic organisations, you will learn a lot. You will also be an absolutely crucial member of the team, as the only full-time member of staff. So you will have a lot of responsibility.

You need to be good at what you do, highly competent and able to work on your own initiative, but understand when to check with others, or make team decisions about stuff. But if that is making you think, ‘Oh, I’m not good enough’, but you can say YES to the most important thing, then don’t let your self-doubt put you off. In my experience, competence and confidence are often not correlated. Sometimes, quite the reverse. Ask someone who knows you well for their honest opinion of whether you are qualified for the role, don’t listen to your imposter syndrome!:-)

Also, you will have a lot of contact with the rest of the team (by phone and email) and a lot of daily online contact with participants. So in some ways it will be sociable. But you will mainly be sat at home, communicating with people electronically, and doing a lot of stuff single-handed. This gives you the freedom to work in your pyjamas and put on the washing machine in between phone calls if you like. But consider if you might find it lonely. Or if you’d find it hard managing your own time and working quite flexible hours.

 

Live chat co-ordinator (freelance, 1 day a week)

Employment details

• We estimate, based on the earlier project, that your duties will take no more than 1 day a week (roughly 8 hours, but this can be spread around the week. You will need to manage your own time and there might be more to do some weeks than others. You are free to do more work in some weeks than others, as long as it gets done.)
• 92 weeks spread over 23 months (allowing for holidays)
• Pay £80/week
• Working remotely, with occasional travel (within the UK)
• As it’s very flexible working, this role may suit a parent with young children, or others with caring responsibilities, although we are open to applications from anyone who fits the spec, whatever your situation.
• We are a family-friendly project and if you have children or other caring responsibilities we will try to be as flexible as possible in making sure any travel or work plans accommodate that.
• Freelance/self-employed
• Line manager Sophia Collins

Duties

The volunteer groups will have weekly online live chats (like an online Q+A) with various scientists and other experts. (You can see all previous live chats here, to get an idea of the kind of thing involved.)

Your job will be to arrange these chats, promote them on Facebook (by setting up an event and inviting the relevant group members), help host the chats when they happen, then afterwards turn the transcripts into readable blogposts. You will then promote these blogposts on Facebook and other social media. Sometimes you will need to hunt out a relevant expert on a given topic, sometimes someone else in the team will have made contact with a relevant expert through their work, but you will take over arranging a suitable time/date and prepping the expert.

You will also help evaluate the chats aspect of the project by sending feedback surveys to the experts after the chats and periodically analysing the feedback. The last two months of the project will probably involve no live chats but focus on evaluation and dissemination.

Live chats will usually be on a weekday at 9pm (as we’ve found that’s when parents are most likely to have some free time to join in) and you will usually need to be available to log in at that time, join in the chat and help facilitate the conversation. Although other team members will be able to cover if needed, on occasion.

Essential

• Good communication and social skills – sensitivity to others, understand how to support and facilitate groups making decisions, help make sure everyone’s voice is heard and progress made towards decisions, without steering them too much.
• Get why we are doing this and what the point of the project is. Care about us helping parents and democratising science.
• Great writing skills – ability to write accessibly and informally.
• Experience with blogs, especially WordPress.

Desirable but not essential

• Experience doing stuff on Facebook
• Experience with project evaluation (both formative and summative)
• Science or medical/public health background

Closing date for both roles is 5pm on Friday 10th March. We will shortlist and telephone interview in the week commencing 13th March. The jobs will ideally start on Monday 20th March.

To apply, email Sophia Collins with your CV and a SHORT covering email, telling me why you’d be great for the job and one mistake you’ve made in your life that you learned something from.