Studies on project documentation and transmission and the battle against re-innovation
Résumé
This communication relates preliminary findings of a study group which examined the process of creation of new outreach and informal education projects. The group is developing recommendations for the organization of the documentation and transmission of past experiences in the domain. Scientific outreach and informal education has a tendency to take on very familiar forms. Very diverse projects which appear different on the surface due to content and context are often organizationally and conceptually very similar. Currently, many volunteer projects are strictly local, “hand-crafted” by their organizers for a specific event or context, and documented only for the use of the operators of the event. This leads to “re-innovation”: because each event is created locally and in isolation from most of past experience, little development occurs and previous errors in conception and/or organization are reproduced. The communication discusses means of avoiding this tendency and exposes some promising dynamics underway in the French chemical community.