HELLO GOOD DAY WE'RE BACK ONLINE IS ANYONE OUT THERE

Today we'll talk about using a rocur for science communication. I'm glad to say I was able to build one that has become quite popular (though, admittedly, not as popular as the one I'm hosting right now).

Backstory in a nutshell: in 2016 I became one of the mods for @realscientists. It was and still is an incredible honor to be part of that team, and the other mods have become great friends.

Pretty soon the idea came up for me to spearhead a German-language spin-off.

The upside: I had all the infrastructure handed to me on a silver platter, due to the hard work that others had already done to create the original Real Scientists.

The downside: I had no idea whether there was a market for this at all.

Many German-speakers also understand a solid amount of English. Those I knew who didn't, and who thus could benefit most from a German-language account, weren't on Twitter (as Twitter is somewhat less popular in German-speaking regions).

So the risk was that we would put effort into building something up that would never generate any interest.
The least I could do was to start out interesting right out of the gate, and I was lucky to convince some excellent tweeps to host the initial weeks. That certainly helped.

Long story short -- @realsci_DE launched in Feb 2017, and has since climbed to more than 9000 followers, which makes me tremendously proud. We've had fantastic curators from many different fields and regions. And I'm lucky to have a fantastic co-mod team.

There are a few things that I've learned doing this that I would like to share. One thing is quite obvious if you think about it, but still feels odd sometimes:

Building up a rocur is not something you can do to express yourself.

What I mean by that: as an admin or mod, your role is to provide a platform, not to communicate anything yourself (unless you host your own rocur for a week, which I've done once, or enter into conversations with the curator or followers, which I like to do)

In other words: you'll be a science communicator, but you won't be in the spotlight.
Now, this is a weird thing to say for me because I put myself in the spotlight ALL THE TIME here on Twitter, but honestly: I enjoy that role. I like supporting others from the background.

So what I'm saying is it may or may not be for you, and also you'll never know if it'll work out until it works out.

The other thing I've learned: it's a good idea to push the envelope. Invite people who are at the edge of what you're looking for. They'll add spice.

There were curators that I more or less had to talk into hosting because they either didn't see themselves as scientists at all, or because they were uncertain about their German language skills. And they *always* did a great job and generated some of the most interesting weeks.

*puts finger on ear* I am getting some new information on this. Turns out I did not, I repeat: not, remember to explain what a rocur even is, as I had planned for the start of the thread. So let me put the wagon in front of the horse for a second:

A rocur is a rotating curated account, which means that someone new takes over the account after a certain amount of time. Like the one you're looking at right now. The fun thing is that, while not everyone on Twitter is familiar with the concept, it's the *easiest* thing to >

explain to people who are not on Twitter (seems paradoxical, I know) just by saying "like the account for the US president."
That one changes hands less frequently than most others, but it's the exact same concept: account stays the same, someone else takes over after a while.

For the Real Scientists accounts, namely @realscientists, @realsci_DE and @RealSci_Nano, this means you'll learn about a new interesting scientist every week. It's happened several times already (even with the younger @realsci_DE account) that former curators have gone on to >

incredible careers as communicators. Was this *because* they hosted Real Scientists? I mean, maybe (as curating can make you more visible and demonstrate your skills), but I think it also attracts people who have already found their voice but not yet a good platform. So you'll >

end up having plenty of of cool talented people as curators at the beginning of their sci comm careers, before they have built their own fan base.

To follow up on the topic of scientific rocurs (see earlier tweets in this thread): I do think that rocurs are the strongest part of science twitter, basically the backbone of what we're doing here. And here's why: