There’s a guest blogger at 2020 Science who’s attempting to answer this question about public participation. As the director of the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), Barbara Herr Harthorn  brings a  doctorate in medical anthropology and transcultural psychiatry from UCLA and a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Bryn Mawr College and postdoctoral research in social psychology which she completed at UCSB to her perspective.

From Harthorn’s posting,

To start with, why do public deliberation on nanotechnology? The simplest answers are because it’s the right thing to do, and because it’s a useful thing to do.

She then explains what the ‘right thing to do’ means,

Public participation in nanotechnology is the right thing to do because it’s a legal mandate – incorporation of some element of public participation is a required element of the Congressional authorization for the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI). It also enables citizens to participate more fully in the democratic process.

This is a very worthwhile (and academic) read if you are interested in the underpinnings of the public ‘deliberation’ process in the US. Harthorn builds on an earlier 2020 Science guest blogger (whom she mentions), David H. Guston, director for the other Center for Nanotechnology in Society at Arizona State University who offered an informal history of the US process.

I am delighted to see that Harthorn also includes some details about public deliberation workshops that have been held in the US,

Both Centers for Nanotechnology in Society (CNS) established by the National Science Foundation – David’s at Arizona State University (ASU) and the one I direct at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) – have engaged in public deliberation exercises. But efforts to date have been on a small scale—they’ve necessarily included a very limited number of participants, and have focused only on a limited subset of the spectrum of applications (CNS-UCSB’s 10 public deliberation workshops in 2007 and 2009 focused on nanotech energy/environment applications or health/enhancement applications; CNS-ASU’s 6 workshops in 2007 looked exclusively at human enhancement technologies). On-line deliberation and the linking of selective face-to-face deliberation results with comprehensive survey data for validating opinions and views in national samples offer some potential methods for future larger scale nano deliberations, as long as diverse publics are included. We are pursuing both strategies on a pilot basis at CNS-UCSB.

As per my posting earlier this week (Why no public dialogue about nanotechnology in Canada when hiding it can hurt the effort?), I was entirely unaware of these public deliberation exercises in the US.