By Sue Hordijenko

Our recent evaluation of the Sciencewise Expert Resource Centre, which helps policy makers to understand and use public dialogue to inspire, inform and improve policy decisions around science and technology, showed that some projects undertaken would have benefited from including data from previous public engagement on the topics.

So, over the next few months we’re going to focus on gathering ‘social intelligence’ on a range of areas in science and technology.  As I was recently asked whether social intelligence was the same as emotional intelligence I’d better just say that for the purposes of this piece of work our definition of social intelligence is what we know about public attitudes toward a particular subject, what the media has reported on that topic, and any significant buzz there has been about it on social networks.