The ways in which science and technology studies (STS) engages with the practices it studies has long been under debate. In the past couple of years this question has gained new attention, in part because of a few cases in which STS researchers quite literally 'took the stand' by intervening in court cases. In a recent section of Social Studies of Science, devoted to the witnessing of Steve Fuller in a US court case about the teaching of 'intelligent design' in public schools, Michael Lynch concluded that 'the articulation of available (and effective) positions in political or legal disputes does not easily mesh with the characteristic orientations and lines of debate in our field ' (2006, p. 825). What seems to be at stake in debates concerning the public engagement of STS and STS researchers is whether STS lends itself to practical interventions at all, or better: whether the practical interventions STS researchers are engaged in can still be called STS. Other authors in the same section of Social Studies of Science also express doubt as to that question; Simon Cole for example argues that 'it is hardly surprising that those who do speak will not be able to speak "on behalf of the field"' (2006, p. 857). Discussions about the public engagement of STS researchers thus seem to be tied into questions of what 'doing STS' is all about. 1 In this article, we try to take up the questions concerning the possibilities of STS interventions by analysing the way we ourselves participated in a project concerned with the development and implementation of an information technology project in healthcare. Let us try to explain further what these questions are with reference to the long (and heavily debated) article on the 'third wave of science studies' by Collins and Evans (2002). In this article, among much else, Collins and Evans make a distinction between different kinds of expertise, for which the categories of 'interactionist' and 'contributory' expertise are of relevance here. 2 Interactionist expertise is by them defined with reference to STS as 'enough expertise to interact interestingly with participants and carry out a sociological analysis'

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