Tidying up, I find a diagram of wisdom from @xuhulk when I was a gradstudent. At the Media Lab, the risk was always to err too far on the side of promotion. But many researchers under-promote. 
I remember being told once that researchers should let the scientific process decide the value and attention our own work deserves and receives.
It's a valuable principle when deciding what to amplify. I wish the system worked reliably that way.
It's a valuable principle when deciding what to amplify. I wish the system worked reliably that way.
My priority in promotion is usually *utilization* - I hope my research will be useful to the people it matters to. That requires different effort from sharing findings with other scientists. Carol Weiss offers a great intro to the idea of utilization acawiki.org/The_Many_Meani…
To think about promotion, I borrow an idea from activism. Power mapping is a simple process for naming the actors in your ecosystem and identifying what audiences will make the most difference. This example plots actors by influence and receptiveness
In my PhD, I saw that online community leaders have high direct influence & a hunger for usable knowledge, at a time of intransigent tech firms and uncertainties about what policymakers and civil society can do to create meaningful change. That's how I was able to imagine CAT Lab
A weakness/strength of many experimenters is that we aspire to a world where our work is routine & boring. Many tend to prefer replication studies to shaky declarations of universal solutions. The classic essay is Esther Duflo's "The Economist as Plumber" economics.mit.edu/files/12569
Think about the audacity it took for an MIT professor to get onstage at the American Economic Association and encourage scientists to do plumbing! I imagine that lecture by Duflo took more nerve than going onstage at TED.
Great point by @saiphcita
