Academics and researchers love Twitter – or at least they used to.

We have used Twitter very successfully as our core communication tool since we began The Global Academy so we are sad to see it falling out of favour with the academic and research community. 

No point moping – time to act.

What are the options for change?

We’re trying 2 things:
One is wider use of Linkedin to stay in touch with people who take part in our 2030 SDGs workshops. With this in mind we’ve created a LinkedIn Group for ‘SDGs Action’.
The second might be Mastodon.

The aim of the Global Academy is to build a global community of researchers who contribute to the Global Goals.  We want these researchers to share stories, best (and worse) practise, ask questions and suggest ideas. Sadly Twitter is no longer meeting that need.  We could set up our own private messaging system, but why build a wall around such useful conversations?


This brings us to Mastodon as an option. The federated model for social media could be the best model right now. It’s worrying/sad to see how little SDGs information is shared on Mastodon so far and our research community is well placed to improve this situation.  The federated/Mastodon model offers many advantages and our audience is already well-represented on other instances (*eg @fediscience.org), so we will have a strong starting point.


What next – could you join us?

We are looking for sponsors or partners to help us bring the SDGs to Mastodon. The SDGs instance (server) will grow the wider SDGs community, alongside Global Academy researchers, so it makes sense to share the cost and/or workload from the start. Years of social media experience has shown that ‘free’ models are not sustainable and we’d like this one to last, so there will be some costs.
If you are a publisher, NGO or other SDGs focussed organisation with an interest in Mastodon, please do get in touch. If you are a ‘SciComms’  researcher and would like to help out that would be wonderful too, so do let us know.

We look forward to hearing from you!
If you would rather discuss this on Mastodon I have an account there https://mastodon.green/@Wendy_Stone