How to turn kitchen conversations into an educational project. “We are volunteers of science” One of its founders, Roman Pereborshchikov, talks about the new scientific and educational project “Obrazovach Lecture Hall: Gutenberg Smoking Room” Newspaper headline about Gutenb smoking room
The Gutenberg Smoking Room is a non-commercial popular science project, a finalist for the Ministry of Education's Loyalty to Science Award in the Best Popular Science Project of 2015 nomination. The Gutenberg Smoking Room is a phenomenon of the volunteer educational movement and the most visited lecture hall in Russia.
"Smoking room" was born in 2012. Initially, it was a friendly club for lovers of popular science and non-fiction literature. We gathered in a narrow circle of friends to retell books to each other and just talk about interesting topics from the world of science.
In 2014, the project became crowded within the club of interests, and the "Smoking room" was transformed into a real lecture hall. In 2015, Kurilka branches appeared in 15 cities, and more than 14,000 people attended our events. We have organized more than a hundred popular science events, at which more than 300 scientists spoke, from graduate students to academics.
Today, the project has acquired international status, having launched a branch in Minsk, and preparing the launch of the project in other countries. At the moment, more than 500,000 people have watched our lectures on the Internet, and more than 22,000 people have visited the project events live!
The main driving force of the project is the love for science, progress and the unquenchable light of knowledge!
We want to involve as many people as possible in science, so admission to all our events is free, since everyone should be able to freely come for new knowledge.
Due to the lack of budget, we do not have the opportunity to purchase high-quality equipment for recording lectures. Because of this, video materials are not always of good quality, and a decent number of lectures are not published at all. This is important, because a lecture attended live by 200 people can be watched by more than 20,000 people on the Internet!
We can continue to record lectures on existing equipment, but in this case, we risk losing even more high-quality popular science content.
Another problem that we want to solve is related to the situation in small regional cities, namely the lack of popular science events there. We want there to be events with the best popularizers of science from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Novosibirsk, Vladivostok and other major scientific centers of Russia. We would like to bring more strong specialists to the regions.
Organizing a lecture hall with an eminent scientist in Moscow or St. Petersburg is not difficult, but bringing him to Tobolsk, Mirny or Bratsk is problematic. We want you to have the opportunity to attend events with the participation of the best Russian and foreign scientists, regardless of where you live!
For 18 months now we have been honestly working for you and all popularizers of science, never asking for anything in return, but the time has come when the future of the project depends on you. Support us, and we promise that we will do everything to make the torch of enlightenment burn even brighter!
- For 600,000 rubles we will be able to purchase the minimum necessary equipment for several (9) branches of the lecture hall.
- If we collect 1 million 150 thousand rubles we can provide equipment for all 17 branches of the lecture hall that exist today.
- If we raise 2 million 200 thousand rubles, we will be able to launch a program of business trips for scientists and science popularizers from major scientific centers in Russia to small regional cities.
- If we collect 3,000,000 rubles, then the dream of many will come true - we will bring Neil deGrasse Tyson to Russia! Yay!
The world we live in is an amazing place full of secrets and mysteries. We live in an amazing time when scientists from all over the world are changing our understanding of the Universe, the microworld and life in all its manifestations. Help us tell the public about science, and we will not be indebted!
Over the course of the project, the Gutenberg Smoking Room has gained a lot of respect and support from scientists, educational institutions, the Ministry of Education and other popular science projects!
The name of the project came from two components. “Smoking Room” is like the memory of the author of the format, Mikhail Yanovich, about the student smoking room of the Russian State Humanitarian University, where sometimes very emotional disputes about everything in the world began. Gutenberg was chosen as the "owner of the smoking room" not only because he is the inventor of the first printing press, but also under the influence of McLuhan's book "The Gutenberg Galaxy", which Janovich read at about the same time. As a result, this name has taken root very well.
- What is Gutenberg Smoking Room?
- Gutenberg's Smoking Room is a popular science project, which in 2014 became, according to our data, the most visited non-commercial lecture hall in Moscow.
- Who are its organizers?
- Founder of the lecture hall and author of the format - Mikhail Yanovich, producer of interactive applications. The curator of the project is your obedient servant, in the past the head of the online publication "Public Assembly".
- What is your format?
- The format of the events is a story about a particular field of knowledge based on the literature that struck the speaker. During one event, the audience listens to three stories on almost any topic. The range of topics is so wide that a biologist, cosmologist and philologist can speak in one event. The duration of each performance is 30 minutes. Without claiming to be a full-fledged report, we aim to interest the audience in self-study of the material.
- Tell us how it all started?
- We can confidently say that our project has not one, but two birthdays. The first day marks the birth of an idea. I can’t say the exact date, since it was about three years ago, and no name even existed then. It all started with the fact that Misha had the idea to retell in the company of friends popular science and non-fiction books that amaze the imagination with their content so much that it is simply impossible to keep this desire in oneself. I think everyone has experienced this at some point. A company of ten people, mostly friends and acquaintances, would gather at someone's house, sit on the floor and share the learned information with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, depending on preferences.
Of course, the impression from the first gatherings was not very good, since the retellings were made according to some kind of formal scenario, there was no exchange of emotions that are born after reading. But these were the first "pancakes", further and still emotions are an integral part of every performance, and, undoubtedly, the public likes it very much. For the next two and a half years, Kurilka slowly but surely expanded. First, until there were too many people for the apartment, and then on the sites of libraries or organizations, where 40-70 people could fit.
How do you select speakers? How is the examination carried out?
- Well, at first they were friends and acquaintances, there was no special need to conduct examinations. Then, with the expansion to the first public events, I had to select topics according to their level of adequacy, an examination of logic, if I may say so. At the same time, absolutely anyone could become a storyteller, neither the experience of public speaking, nor the presence of any skills was required, only the topic of “something non-fictional” and desire. Definitely, it had an audience for us, everyone could easily become a part of this process. And then the more people came to us, the more seriously the selection was carried out, we always wanted to match the scale.
Now it is much more difficult to become one of the speakers of the Gutenberg Smoking Room than at the beginning, there are a lot of applicants. To do this, the candidate must have experience in public speaking and be an expert in the field he is talking about. Sometimes we make exceptions, then one of the two conditions is enough. For example, Andrey Seryakov, a nuclear physicist, CERN employee and Science Slam winner, recently spoke with us, but at the same time he told why European civilization was historically more technologically and socially developed than the same tribes of the African continent or the Inca Empire. Our format allows these kinds of experiments, and we think it's very cool.
- Where did this name come from?
- The name itself came from two components. "Smoking room" - like Misha's memory of the student smoking room of the Russian State Humanitarian University, where sometimes very emotional disputes about everything in the world began. Gutenberg was chosen as the "owner of the smoking room" not only because he is the inventor of the first printing press, but also under the influence of McLuhan's book "The Gutenberg Galaxy", which Misha read at about the same time. As a result, this name has taken root very well.
- Can you smoke at your events?
- We could take the name "Gutenberg Brothel", but this does not mean that we would give each person who came to a girl of easy virtue. Although the idea is not bad. You can not smoke, everything is written in the legislation on this matter. My attitude towards smoking is extremely negative.
- Have you participated in the "Smoking Room" from the very beginning?
No, not from the very beginning. I became involved much later, only six months ago, but immediately set the goal of transforming the "Smoking Room" into "the best lecture hall in the country." It's funny, but in a certain sense I already succeeded. During this time, we have achieved a significant improvement in the quality of content, opened a YouTube channel, joined forces with the Obrazovach project, launched a branch in St. Petersburg and rebranded.
The full name now sounds like "Obrazovach Lecture Hall: Gutenberg Smoking Room". Clumsily, of course, but you can't erase the words from the song. In general, the project "Educator" should be noted separately. It was created by former employees of Lenta.ru Andrei Konyaev, Igor Belkin and Alexander Ershov. In nine months, the Obrazovacha group on the VKontakte social network gained more than 150,000 subscribers by publishing news on popular science topics and providing them with funny pictures “on the topic of the day.”
We very easily found a common language with them, literally one meeting and shook hands, and then it started. Together with the new name, we got from them access to a whole army of knowledge-hungry brains. More than 200 people came to the first event in the building of the Moscow Central Telegraph, 250 came to the next one, and about twice as many watched the online broadcast. So we have to look for as big venues as possible.
- It's complicated? Now you can rent any room.
- In general, there are certain difficulties with this, since the Gutenberg Smoking Room is a completely non-commercial project and admission to our meetings is exclusively free. Nobody earns or receives bonuses. We are science volunteers. This, of course, is not a unique case, but on such a scale, I think that this is the first time. We do not have the budget to purchase expensive equipment or rent halls. Doors are opened to us solely because of the quality of the content and sympathy for the format.
- So you are working for an idea?
- Yes. Gutenberg Smoking Room is a very personal project for quite a lot of people. When everything is done for free, outside help is of great importance. It can be said that the "Smoking Room" is a human symbiosis, in which several dozen people participate, each of which pursues the goal of popularizing science among the masses.
- What are your plans for the coming years?
- Speaking about the future, we are making a lot of efforts to expand into the regions. On January 9, 2015, our branch in St. Petersburg held the first event, which was organized by the guys from the KL10TCH IT club. Spectators could hardly fit in two halls. Their success convinced us of the correctness of this undertaking. We plan to create branches in all million-plus cities, and Kazan is next in line. Also in the summer, together with colleagues from other sites, we plan to organize a major science festival in the Moscow region. But for this, one desire is not enough, so we are looking for sponsors and partners. We hope that such an event will be in great demand among young people and families with children.
Interviewed by Natalia Demina
Participants of one of the largest Russian educational projects " Smoking room Gutenberg"plan to create the Gutenberg Foundation, aimed at the large-scale popularization of science in the Russian Federation and the CIS. To this end, the project organizers launched a crowd campaign on Planeta.ru. They plan to use all the funds raised to register the fund, implement existing programs and launch new ones, which will eventually form the fund's activities.
about the project
Members of the educational community plan to raise more than 1.5 million rubles and allocate them to provide branches with high-quality recording equipment, establish the first Russian award for bloggers who popularize science, organize a large-scale federal science festival "Science Volunteer Day", as well as register an educational fund " Gutenberg" and the solution of its problems. The community initiative has already been supported by such scientists and popularizers of science as Alexander Panchin, Asya Kazantseva, Alexander Sokolov, Stanislav Drobyshevsky, as well as bloggers Vitaly Egorov (“Green Cat”), Evgenia Timonova (“Everything is like animals”) and many others. Among the rewards donated by famous scientists and science journalists, you can find not only books and tickets to events, but also branded items, board games, excursions, comics from Obrazovach's pictures and a trip to a bar with N + 1 editor-in-chief.
About the fund
According to Roman Pereborshchikov, head of the Gutenberg Smoking Room project, the Gutenberg Foundation will provide organizational, methodological, financial and material support to developing popular science projects:
The general level of public awareness of the latest achievements of science, the degree of critical thinking of citizens and their ability to make informed choices in various life situations depend on the quantity and quality of popular science projects in Russia. We believe that science should be close and understandable to everyone, so we count on the support of society in achieving our educational goals.
Roman Pereborshchikov
About Gutenberg Smoking Room
The educational project Gutenberg Smoking Room, which appeared in 2014, develops several areas of educational activity at once. With the support of the AST publishing house, its participants established the Gutenberg Library series of scientific literature for young authors publishing for the first time; organized a network of free popular science lecture halls in 25 Russian cities; launched their own educational video channel with lectures; and created a program to support aspiring popular science video bloggers. One of them, Alexander Ivanov, the author of the channel " Chemistry simple” recently received the Ministry of Education’s Loyalty to Science Award for the Best Popular Science Project on Social Networks.
We talked with Zmitser Bylinovich, one of the organizers of the Minsk non-profit educational lecture hall Gutenberg Smoking Room, to find out how the project with scientific lectures became so popular and what to expect from it in Minsk.
The idea of a smoking room appeared among Moscow students - first in the format of a book club, - Zmiter tells us when we meet at the Ili club, where the second Minsk "Smoking room" will take place on Saturday. - Initially, the guys got together and discussed the science pop they read, like Hawking and Dawkins. But then Roman Pereborshchikov, the current ideological inspirer and head of Kurilok, looked there and said that, guys, this is not a very interesting format, it’s worth shifting it to a lecture one. What was most surprising was that he was not sent, and the "Smoking Room" really quickly became a lecture hall when people are going to listen to three lectures for half an hour about life, the Universe and all that.
Lecturers, as a rule, are young scientists, junior and senior researchers, sometimes doctors of sciences, and sometimes senior students. Each lecture is followed by a short discussion and the opportunity to ask questions, and lecturers, instead of trying to present the material in detail and look at the paper, simply try to open the topic for the listener and encourage him to further study on his own. For a year and a half (largely thanks to the information support public "Educator") "Smoking rooms" appeared in 14 cities of Russia with more than a hundred events attended by 14,000 people. These smoking rooms featured a variety of topics: from the nature of schizophrenia to the conquest of space.
Topics can be very different - only any pseudoscience is excluded. And, of course, no one will set the goal of teaching you how to take triple integrals, the goal is to interest, inspire you to do science yourself. And as a result, this format is in great demand - in Moscow, the non-profit "Kurilka" holds events at three venues at once: about culture together with the Gogol Museum, about space together with the Museum of Cosmonautics and about neurobiology and other topics at the site of the Moscow State Engineering University with a capacity of 500 people .
Zmiter himself is a second-year student of applied mathematics at Belarusian State University, and another organizer, Dmitry Grishchenko, is a geophysicist and editor of the "Physics of the Impossible" public. They learned about the “Smoking Room” while reading “Obrazovach”, and then responded to the call to organize lecture halls in their cities and thus assembled the first Minsk “Smoking Room”:
- The first "Smoking Room Gutenberg" was held at the Minsk Planetarium on February 13. The main problem was in the streaming broadcast due to the complexities of the planetary Internet. But we were very surprised and pleased by the number of people. We announced the event in the public “Tea with raspberry jam” and “Onliner”, and in half an hour all 120 people who can accommodate the Minsk planetarium registered. This time we settled on the new Ili club, as it can accommodate 120-150 people, and there will also be drinks and food during the break.
The second Minsk “Gutenberg Smoking Room” will be held on Saturday, March 12, at 16:00. It will include three half-hour lectures: Russian cosmonautics popularizer Vitaly Egorov, known on the Internet as Zelenyikot, will talk about whether there is water on Mars, where and how to look for it. Geophysicist and co-organizer of the smoking room Dmitry Grishchenko will explain why Lake Vostok is unique and how its study helps to understand the history of the Earth and the Solar System, and biologist Alexei Shpak will talk about why bats are so special and what is the reason for their phenomenal longevity.
Registration for the smoking room is passing, but you can just look live broadcast of lectures. And since there will be many more “Smoking Rooms” in Minsk, so as not to miss them, you can subscribe to the public “
If you are subscribed to at least one popular science educational public on social networks, the phrase "Smoking Room Gutenberg" you are probably familiar with. It took about a year for this project to turn from a Moscow semi-closed club of science-pop literature lovers into a volunteer network of lecture halls that covered a dozen and a half cities of the country - from Moscow to Vladivostok.
According to the format, “Gutenberg Smoking Room” is 3 open lectures of 30 minutes each about “life, the universe and all that” in a popular science vein, followed by a discussion. Meetings can take place in any venue that can accommodate those who wish: from university auditoriums to trendy cafes.
In July 2014, Roman Pereborshchikov became the project manager, and Kurilka headed towards the lecture hall. From stories about specific books, they switched to lectures on popular science topics, which also determined the conditions for choosing speakers: if initially it was enough to read a book and be able to talk about it in a fascinating way, now the speakers should be experts in the field they are talking about. Not all scientific topics can be explained to the unprepared public “on the fingers” in half an hour, so there are requirements for the quality of video presentations.
The range of topics for lectures has always been wide - from classical philosophy to quantum physics. Everything related to the latest data of science about the structure of man, society and the world at various levels can become a subject of discussion. The organizers said (and still say) a strict “no” to esotericism and personal growth trainings. Unless, of course, you want to consider them in a scientific way.
The meetings soon began to gather 200 listeners each, and the real stars of pop science became the speakers. But Gutenberg's Smoking Room would have remained one of the many Moscow lecture halls (Muscovites can't complain about the lack of intellectual events), if it hadn't stepped into the virtual space.
The first "Smoking room" in the format of a large lecture hall in Moscow. Medieval historian Mikhail Mayzuls talks about the evolution of the Japanese mentality.
In 2014, Kurilka got its own YouTube channel where video recordings of lectures began to be posted. The project "made friends" with a super popular resource "Educator", whose Vkontakte page now has over 300,000 subscribers. Obrazovach gave access to an audience of thousands across Russia and a new name for what was happening (now officially it is Obrazovach Lecture Hall: Gutenberg Smoking Room).
Now enthusiasts anywhere in the country can be inspired by YouTube videos, want to have the same love for science in their city, and write about it to Roman Pereborshchikov, the head of the Obrazovach Lecture Hall: Gutenberg Smoking Room project. Roman will readily tell you how to organize a lecture hall and provide informational support. Moscow , Saint Petersburg , Kazan , Rostov-on-Don , Kaluga , Omsk , Astrakhan , Vladivostok , Mound , Ufa , Novosibirsk , Tomsk , Krasnodar , Chelyabinsk- cities that have already hosted the Gutenberg Smoking Room at least once. Video recordings of all performances from the cities are sent to the editing department of the Moscow "Smoking Room", which employs 10 people. Recently, recordings have been subtitled for the deaf and hard of hearing.
Biologist, science journalist and administrator of the VKontakte community "Scientists against pseudoscience" Alexander Panchin - about why you should not be afraid of genetic engineering.
“In fact, we are stimulating the creation of lecture halls throughout the country. The Gutenberg Smoking Room is not one lecture hall, but fifteen, united by one name and idea. Over the past year, we have held more than 100 lecture events, which were attended by about 14,000 people. Now about 80 people are involved in the project instead of one, large museums and universities have become our partners, and the goal of the project was to create the first federal lecture hall in Russia,” Roman says about the growth of the project, worthy of a good business presentation. But "Smoking Room" is a fundamentally non-commercial project.
The main advantage of our project is its main drawback - a completely non-commercial development model. Usually, the lack of a budget puts an end to many projects that deserve public attention, but we have turned this minus into a plus. The lecture hall is expanding not by increasing the budget and staff, but due to the ideology that it embodies: the popularization of science in society by the forces of society itself. Modern youth is ready to take responsibility for what only universities and other educational and cultural institutions were doing before us.
Roman Pereborshchikov
The baton of science popularization in cities is often taken over by those who already have some organizational and educational experience. For example, in Kazan, the Center for Contemporary Culture "Change" (we once) became the permanent site of the "Smoking Room". In St. Petersburg, the meetings are organized by the "live warm lamp" discussion club "Pinch of Salt". In Vladivostok, the team that had previously created the science cafe Let’s Science! on the basis of the Far Eastern Federal University.
We have been making a smoking room in Vladivostok since May of this year. And the desire to do it appeared, because we were fascinated by the scale of the project. It's nice to feel that your views on the need of society to popularize knowledge are shared by a fairly large number of people across the country.
We have enough resources in the city to create educational projects. There are both interesting specialists and requests from listeners. We actively cooperate with all educational platforms that we have, because together we can make more interesting and large-scale events. For example, together with another lecture hall, we organized a teleconference with the Moscow Kurilka, during which we talked with the authors of the Sputnik Mayak rocket-building project.Anton Krotov coordinator of Gutenberg Smoking Room in Vladivostok
The local TV channel tells how the Gutenberg Smoking Room in Vladivostok organized a large-scale science festival as part of the All-Russian festival of the Enlightener award.
If in the same Kazan "Change" managed to form a circle of listeners ready for various forms of conversation, then for many cities open lectures on science are a bold experiment, the results of which are difficult for the organizers to predict. For example, after the first "Smoking Room" in Chelyabinsk (which took place just a month ago), the organizers admitted to a local journalist that they expected a maximum of 30 people to watch. And 150 came! And most of them voted for the second one to take place after the first "Smoking Room". Somewhere things are not going so well, and in Kaluga, for example, the format has not taken root (but it is quite possible that there will be those who want to try it again).
The third participant of the Gutenberg Smoking Room in Tomsk is about video encoding.
The natural (and often the only) source of speakers in cities is the local scientific community. A young graduate student or “settle down” scientist of any direction can give a fascinating lecture to a completely new audience for himself, and then collect views and “likes” on the general YouTube channel.
Any meeting of young scientists with the public, whether there are 70 or 170 people in the hall, is already a success. In one case, an unexpected selection of lectures can be considered luck: for example, one evening we listened to lectures on intuition, Platonic philosophy and quantum physics; another time about schizophrenia, political competition and firefighting; or - about dreams, quantum computers and string theory. A separate success can be considered the excitement of the audience's interest, when after 10 minutes allotted for questions from the audience, the discussion flows into the lobby and continues for another 20-30 minutes.
Denis Volkov coordinator of Gutenberg Smoking Room in Kazan
Denis Volkov notes that physics and medicine have always been successfully developed in Kazan, and representatives of these sciences traditionally collect applause in the Kurilka. For example, a lecture by a practicing neurologist Ksenia Ovsyannikova, dedicated to the neurophysiology of sleep, once turned the lecture hall into a real clinic. Immediately after the lecture, a group of 15-20 listeners lined up in front of the lecturer-physician, and the flow of questions, more personal than scientific, did not stop for about half an hour.
About the secrets of sleep - Ksenia Ovsyannikova, a neurologist from Kazan.
Roman Pereborshchikov says that the popularization of science, first of all, must be popular, otherwise it turns into intellectual snobbery. Therefore, science in the events of the "Smoking Room" is part of the entertainment program, with bright presentations and talented speakers. It is important to tell people about science, because otherwise a person “stagnates” in his ideas about the world and cannot adequately perceive the changes that are taking place.
I feel that young people are now really more interested in science. I think one of the reasons for this phenomenon is that the world around us is a world built by science. We perceive the present as the "future". This perception is also manifested in popular culture: films, serials, animation. The increased interest in science is a derivative of the achievements of this science, since we understand that without it our world will return to the Middle Ages. In Russia, by the way, this interest is fueled precisely by the medieval obscurantism that reigns in the laws and in the implanted Orthodoxy. Because of this, a huge number of young people are turning to science, as it personifies the freedom of thought.
Roman Pereborshchikov Head of the project "Obrazovach Lecture Hall: Gutenberg Smoking Room"
Organizers of various popular science events often talk about the problem of a rapidly reaching "ceiling" in the number of audiences: the same people come to talk and listen to science, from time to time, from site to site. The format of the Gutenberg Smoking Room helps to engage a new audience in the conversation, which is driven not so much by a thirst for knowledge as by curiosity. This curiosity will make time for three half-hour lectures, especially if the event is promoted in social networks.
Lecture hall in Kazan. Alexander Granitsa, psychiatrist at the Clinical Psychiatric Hospital named after I. Bekhterev - about schizophrenia.
So, one of the most massive non-Moscow "Smoking Rooms" was held in September this year in St. Petersburg. Debating club
