3rd EISCAT_3D User Meeting, 18-20 May 2011, Uppsala, Sweden

Reaching out to a global user community

Th. Ulich¹, D. McKay-Bukowski²

¹Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, Sodankylä, Finland,
²STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Didcot, U.K.

Abstract

For any large-scale science facility, it is essential to have an active user community, who are interested in the facility and make use of it. In order to create a vibrant, international user community, EISCAT has recently begun to make use of modern means of rapid communication, such as a mailing list, a blog, a Facebook page, and a Twitter feed. Thereby EISCAT offers a wide range of tools for discussion among interested users, and, critically, EISCAT becomes accessible and approachable through these various means by anyone.

In return, some of these tools give feedback to the project, because they readily provide statistics regarding, e.g., from which country how many people use a given service, and what topics they are most interested in.

Here we will look at the outreach effort of both EISCAT_3D and KAIRA, which is very successful, and which has inspired the outreach efforts of EISCAT_3D.