Abstract
Marine energy developers and researchers indicate that they have information and data needs that can only be met by coastal communities and marine energy end users, such as maritime industries and other Blue Economy applications, but lack the capability to connect with and create exchanges with such stakeholders. Bridging communication divides like these is part of the Atlantic Marine Energy Center (AMEC) Stakeholder Engagement team’s work to build and strengthen the networks among the marine energy industry, academia, and end-users. In 2023, the team embarked on an initiative to support researchers and developers to connect with maritime applications and non-experts. As part of this initiative, our team solicited and received questions from researchers and industry experts in attendance at UMERC 2023 (hereafter participants), that they would ask to meet their information and data needs, with the prompt: “What questions for prospective marine energy users or stakeholders would advance your work if answered?”
We coded the submitted questions for thematic content and target audience and measured their jargon content. Participants posed 170 usable questions across 29 coded themes. Some of the most common themes ranged from “power needs” and “concerns”, which tended to center on communities and potential end users, to “technical data sharing” and “constraints”, which tended to target researchers and developers. Less popular themes included “energy scale”, “power costs”, and “failure”. We scored each question with the De-Jargonizer from the Jargon Project. Jargon scores ranged from 58 to 100 (on a scale of 0 to 100, where a score of 100 indicates absence of jargon) with an average score of 91, indicating a high level of suitability of language for use with a general audience. Even with a low incidence in usage of jargon, our analyses found that many of the questions did not follow best practices recommended for communicating technical information with nontechnical audiences. We engaged in follow-up correspondence with 39 participants who identified themselves when submitting their questions to report back about the responses to our prompt and to share targeted information about best practices. We invited participants to attend small group sessions to workshop questions for non-expert stakeholders on their identified topics of interest.
This work contributes to efforts to address the gap in our knowledge of experts’ interactions with those outside of their domain of expertise regarding communications that support new technology development. This ongoing initiative will evaluate the impact of the shared best practices on the requests marine energy researchers and developers have for non-experts. In future work, our team will use the workshopped questions to engage with potential marine energy end users and coastal communities. Through these efforts, we will connect stakeholders and build networks that span the expert and nonexpert domains of the marine energy space.