Michelle Brook will be chairing a discussion between Mark Henderson, Dr Julian Huppert MP, and a third speaker (to be confirmed). The discussion will cover the engagement of science and technology in policy and politics, and geek activism. The evening will cover issues such as whether science matters in a policy and political environment, whether it should play a bigger role and what can be done to facilitate this. Each guest will speak for a short time and comment of each others’ thoughts, before the event is opened up to the floor for a question and answer session.

About the speakers:
Mark Henderson is former science editor at The Times and author of ‘The Geek Manifesto’, which addresses some of the questions that will be covered during the evening. With the book out for a few months, we will ask how the geek community has reacted and what he knows now that he wishes he knew then. For those who haven’t read the Geek Manifesto (and Mark will happily sign as many copies as you wish to buy), Mark’s standard talk is available online and there are extracts from the book on his blog.

Dr Julian Huppert has been MP for Cambridge since the 2010 election. He’s known as “the Science MP”: unfortunately, he’s the only one. He’ll comment on what can be done to change that, what possibly shouldn’t be done, and whatever else he wishes to talk about.

Bring yourselves, your friends and anyone else who may be even vaguely interested -we want hard and challenging questions for both, interesting discussions and ideally some fun projects to come out of the evening.

The event will be in the Cambridge Union. Arrive from 7pm for drinks, and talks will begin at 7.30pm. More information can be found below or on the Cambridge Geek website. Sponsorship for the event will be provided by the kind folks at
ecm.

The evening will follow the usual Cambridge Geek Night timing formats (i.e. two halves), but will be a slightly different structure due to extended Q&A. Lightning talks (more elevator pitches) will be towards the end of the evening, looking at what people may be interested in doing related to the evening’s discussion, principally looking to get like-minded people to chat about your project in the bar afterwards.

For more information, our website is http://cambridgegeeknights.net, or you can follow @camgeeknights on Twitter. Hope to see you there.