Internet and social networks have multiplied the direct interactions between individual seismologists and citizens. Observational seismology has entered schools where they can detect signals from large global earthquakes and do real science with real data. Doing real science is one of the goals of citizen science projects alongside augmenting data collection and crowdsourcing observations on earthquake phenomena. Today there is a convergence between scientific and educational seismology projects. Many institutes and individual scientists are active on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Smartphone apps are replacing websites as the main source of rapid earthquake information. Communication has also expanded from rapid information to time evolving hazard, risk and even operational earthquake forecasts. These developments change the way we, as scientists interact with society. They present significant opportunities to transfer the value of scientific research to citizens, in order to avoid or minimize risky interaction as demonstrated by the l’Aquila trial.

We invite papers on schools, citizen science or public communications initiatives as well as analysis of their ethical, social and cultural implications.