Geoscience Education & Public Outreach Network (GEPON)

GEPON is an emerging network envisioned to support effective education and public outreach (EPO) and engagement of the general public with the enterprise of science. This network will:

  • Provide an infrastructure to facilitate collaboration between scientists, educators, and EPO professionals

  • Provide support systems for professional development and cross-disciplinary learning for all involved in EPO activities

  • Recognize and give value to current EPO activities, thereby encouraging involvement by others

  • Promote and help to institutionalize a cultural change that recognizes, values, and supports outreach as both a responsibility and an opportunity

There are currently many successful outreach activities conducted at various scales by individuals, institutions, and organizations. However, these efforts remain largely disconnected from one another. What is missing is the ability to leverage these efforts so that EPO activities can move beyond isolated, individual success stories to a coordinated national effort that has the potential for much greater impact. GEPON can heighten the visibility of successful EPO programs that can serve as models, and function as a resource for new efforts. GEPON will not supplant or oversee existing programs; instead, it would showcase successful efforts, amplify their success, and promote the scaling and sharing of proven strategies so that larger and more diverse audiences can be reached. GEPON will serve to highlight current exemplars of EPO activities that provide qualitative and quantitative measures of successful outcomes, satisfying NSF Criterion 2 requirements.

2005 Geoscience Outreach Workshop

The initial workshop, which was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, brought together 26 education and public outreach (EPO) experts to discuss how geoscience education and outreach activities can support the science research community in efforts to fulfill the National Science Foundation's Criterion 2 - Broader Impacts requirement for scientific research.

Out of the workshop came the Making a Broader Impact report, which is downloadable in various versions:

PDF: full color (large file- 22 MB), text only (238 KB)

HTML: printable

2006 Geoscience Outreach Workshop

The report from the 2005 workshop articulated the need for a geoscience education and public outreach network (GEPON) to support broader impact activities within the geoscience community. The report also recommended that a second workshop be held to articulate the characteristics, strategies, and management models of such a network. To address these goals, a GEPON workshop was held March 22-24, 2006 in Boulder , Colorado and attended by 38 scientists and Education and Public Outreach (EPO) professionals from 17 states and the District of Columbia . Common to all participants was the recognition of the importance of Broader Impact (BI) initiatives to increase public support for scientific research, to encourage students to consider careers in science, and to improve the level of scientific literacy among the broad citizenry.

Text version of the report from the 2006 workshop can be downloaded. (Opens in a new window)