We had our first Café Scientifique this evening. It was a great success, with 82 people in attendance…and in a small town like this, that is an amazing turnout.

Keith Brugger, of our geology discipline, gave an excellent summary of the evidence for global climate change. We got a good response from the crowd, with lots of good questions that kept us going for the full two hours. We get to do it all again next month—25 October, with Timna Wycoff discussing antibiotic resistance in conventional and organic dairy farms. I gotta tell you, putting on these things is worth it. It's a great way to connect with the community.

I've gotten a few questions about the logistics, so I'll expand on that.

We were contacted by Shanai Matteson of the Bell Museum last spring about putting this all together. We had some meetings with the Bell Museum folks and attended one of their Cafés Scientifiques to get a feel for what they did and how they worked. We also got some preliminary commitments from various people at UMM to do presentations in the next year (which is probably a good idea in general: get people to promise to do things long before the event, so they are blissfully unaware of how much other work they've got to do.) It was a big help to see Shanai and Kevin Williams (who emcees the Twin Cities events) in action and get a general idea of what a Café Scientifique looked like, but really, there was little work involved on our end at that point.

We slacked off over most of the summer.

In early August, we got serious about scouting out venues. Our main problem here is that we're a small town, so the choices were limited. One other constraint is that we definitely needed to get a site off-campus—our goal is to bring science to the community, after all. Our top choice was a bar in town with a large meeting room and beer on tap and a video projection system already in place…but unfortunately, some political conflicts between the management and various officials in town and the university administration made that untenable. We're hoping that gets resolved sometime in the future, and then we can move to a bigger, beerier venue. Our second choice is the town's coffeehouse, which is very nice and informal and serves good coffee and light meals, but has a few problems. It's small. Our audience of 82 made the place very crowded, and we can't possibly expand our audience much. It's not easily dimmed, which made video projection difficult. And it's run by a consortium of local churches, who informed us that certain controversial topics—can you say "evolution" and "stem cells"—were absolutely forbidden. We're sticking with the coffeehouse for now, but we're looking for alternatives. A third choice is our local county historical museum, which has an excellent meeting space, but is currently being remodeled. It also lacks any kind of refreshment service, but we've got one community group willing to cook and serve and sell food and drink to attendees as a fundraiser for their organization, which might compensate and would give us another link to the community.

In August, our university relations people, Judy Riley at UMM and Nina Shepherd at the Bell Museum, started sending out press releases to newspapers and doing write-ups for various university newsletters. They took care of the general announcements to the world at large.

In September, a few weeks before the event, I had to do some real work. I put together a simple web page and made some flyers; my wife, Mary Gjerness Myers, did a lot of the grunt work of running around town to all the local businesses, laundromats, gas stations, banks, etc., asking them to post the flyers in their windows. We pretty much blanketed the town with our little yellow notices. I called up the local radio station and got a short interview that was broadcast out to the community in the early morning hours, which is a very effective time to get in touch with the farm community. We also sent out a few e-mail notices, but those are better at alerting university people, not the community we really wanted to target.

The day before the event, we borrowed equipment from the university's Media Services department and did a quick run through of the gear, making sure that the video projector was going to be visible in the too-well lit coffeehouse, and trying out some arrangements of the furniture to be sure we were going to be able to fit everything in.

I should also mention that all this time our first speaker, Keith Brugger, was slaving over his presentation. The presenters get stuck with more work than the organizers, I think, and it also helps to pick a perfectionist to give the first talk.

The day of the talk I wrote up some introductory notes, to explain what the Café Scientifique was all about. We also put together some very silly quiz questions using some of the terminology Keith would be using; the idea is to do a little warmup act, giving out little prizes to audience members willing to answer questions, just to get everyone in the mood to interrupt and raise their hands and participate.

The hour before the Café Scientifique started, I showed up at the coffee house with our media gear. Several students helped out—Steve Schmidt, Mike Blasberg, and Laura McMullin—by setting up speakers and projectors and shuffling chairs around and running around to hand out prizes during the introductions. Student labor is a good thing, I highly recommend it.

When 6:00 finally rolled around, I just stood up, spent about fifteen minutes trying to get the audience in the mood, and then sat back and let Keith Brugger do all the hard work. My part was fairly easy, and I could just sit back and enjoy the show.

We get to do it all again in a month. I'm not going to worry about it for a week or so, but then I have to get specific titles from the next two speakers, pass the info on to university relations, slap together some more flyers, and round about mid-October, contact the radio station again. The second time through should be even easier. The only major task I might have to face is finding a new venue if we outgrow our existing one.

If anyone out there wants to get a Café Scientifique rolling in your town, feel free to contact me. I'm happy to encourage this sort of thing and can give you more details on how to get one going.