Speed Debating

Overview

"Will open-source biology create value similarly to open-source computing? Should synthetic biology only be applied to resolve human problems or can it be used simply to advance our resources? Who decides and how informed do the decision makers have to be?"

Last year, UCL iGEM 2011 exhibited art works and films at the Dana Centre to explore the language of synthetic biology, followed by a panel discussion with science philosophers and synthetic biology artists. From the feedback we received, we realised the audience were keener to discuss the scope and parameters of synthetic biology.

This year we targeted the interest in our project to achieve a bottom-up collection of ideas. We planned to feed audience's responses to our work back into the project.

The Event

In August, we hosted an evening of speed debating to deliberate the question “Should synthetic organisms be released in the ocean to combat plastic pollution?”. The turn-out was successful, with attendees ranging from all different backgrounds including Bloomberg, London Futurists group, London Hackspace and the Guardian.

The debate took part as four rounds, with three questions leading to the main proposition. Tables of three to four guests were chaired by one of the UCL iGEM team members. Each round saw all tables debating the same question for a quarter of an hour before our hosts guided guests to move to another table and introduced the following question. This floor debate format gave attendees the opportunity to exchange ideas with half of the other guests.

Feedback

In addition to chairing team members at each table, we collected further feedback in several forms. An opinion matrix tracked the evolution of opinion throughout the evening - guests were invited to place a red dot reflecting their viewpoint at the start of the debate and a green dot at the end. An arguments box on each table collected interesting points or questions the guest heard at their table. Finally, we created a feedback questionnaire and invited guests to submit feedback by the ticket website, Eventbrite.