Ambassador-Mediated Public Engagement: A Responsible and Realistic Scientific Public Engagement Framework

Scientific researchers and policy experts have long called for enhanced public engagement, as many novel scientific innovations challenge public values and are not regularly discussed in public forums before implementation across society. Furthermore, recent experiences with COVID-19 vaccine rollout and growing mistrust in medical and scientific professionals reveal a widening schism between scientific and non-scientific communities, underscoring the need to re-examine our current systems of public engagement. The process of public engagement is crucial to establishing regulatory guidance and social consensus that take into account public values. While many approaches to public engagement have been proposed, they are often impractical, inaccessible, and fail to consistently answer or incorporate value-based concerns. Here, we propose a three-party system of public engagement—scientists, ambassadors, and the public—that together helps protect against misinformation and neglect of public values by utilizing existing organizations and advocacy groups alongside social media infrastructure. Our model is iterative, deliberative, and stepwise, with information flowing from scientists to ambassadors to the public, and back. The use of ambassadors and a modern, technology-based means of communication ensure that scientific information will be contextualized in a value-based framework during both development and implementation and that inclusive engagement is possible.