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Hi all Since I returned from the "Evolving Science Communication" conference in Bristol last week I have been giving some thought to how we might better share the learning that we are all doing. I suggested at the conference that we should all publish our evaluations on some kind of central website. However, people raised some perfectly valid objections to that, not least among which is that most evaluations are very long and boring, and you could spend a long time reading through a lot of stuff which turns out to be not very useful... So, in conversation with Karen Bultitude at UWE, I have knocked together a very simple, relatively short set of questions which give what I think are the key bits of oinformation that you might ewant to know about a project. It's a kind of evaluation abstract, if you like. I thought that it might be possible for people who wanted to share their evaluation, to fill one of these out, and then anyone who was interested could have a quick look, and if they wanted to know more then they could contact the relevant person. I'm thinking that this could be a pretty low-tech resource where you just chuck an email out onto the mail list and let the PSCI-Com archive do the rest. But you could obviously set it up as some kind of database if you wanted to put in the work to set one up (I know nothing about databases and wouldn't know where to start). One criticism is that this might gum up people's inboxes even more than normal - but I don't know how strongly people feel that that would be a problem. I am convinced that there is a better way for us to share information better than we do at the moment... but this may not be it... Anyway, at the bottom of this email you can see my suggested questions - I'm happy for people to use, change or ignore them as they see fit. But it would be good to know whether people think this is a) a good idea which we should try, b) a good idea which needs a tweak, or c) a stupid idea. Love Sweetness & Light Dom Dom McDonald Head of Public Engagement Science Oxford 1-5 London Place Oxford OX4 1BD T: 01865 728953 D: 01865 810021 F: 01865 791854 www.scienceoxford.com Information-Sharing Questions 1. Project Name 2a. Contact name 2b. email address 2c. project website 3a. Project start date 3b. Project end date 4. What were the aims of the project? 5. Where did the project take place? 6. Who was the target audience? 7. What did you actually do? (max 50 words, please) 8. How did you evaluate what you did? (max 30 words, please) 9. Which three aspects of the project were you most pleased with? 10. Which three aspects of the project would you do differently if you did a version of the project in the future? ********************************************************************** 1. To suspend yourself from the list, whilst on leave, for example, send an email to mailto:[log in to unmask] with the following message: set psci-com nomail -- [include hyphens] 2. To resume email from the list, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message: set psci-com mail -- [include hyphens] 3. To leave psci-com, send an email to [log in to unmask] with the message: leave psci-com -- [include hyphens] 4. Further information about the psci-com discussion list, including list archive, can be found at the list web site: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/psci-com.html 5. The psci-com gateway to internet resources on science communication and science and society can be found at http://psci-com.ac.uk 6. To contact the Psci-com list owner, please send an email to mailto:[log in to unmask] **********************************************************************