Special Bulletin 1 for Participating Institutions June 2005

This is the first occasional bulletin for contact officers in the science centres and museums that have agreed to participate in the APEC Science Centre Impact Project.

Your Ideas, Please!

What is a science centre?

One of the aims of the APEC Science Centre Impact project is 'to assist science centres and museums to articulate - to governments and stakeholders - their particular assets and the contributions to community and "economy" interests'.

So ... just what is a science centre - in terms that would help government officers better understand the science centre/museum sector?

We would greatly appreciate your thoughts (from a paragraph to a page or two) in relation to your individual science centre.

Please summarise the key contributions that your science centre makes to its community. It will be helpful if you can link these contributions to government policies - science policies, education or lifelong learning policies, innovation policies etc.

We will use your thoughts on 'What is a science centre?' as a stimulus for wider discussion among institutions in the APEC region and, in particular, as part of our communications with government officers in APEC countries or ‘economies’.

Please provide your response by 15 July 2005 and please include an indication of whether you would be willing to have your contribution published on our website in full (with or without attribution), or would prefer to have it used as input for a general summary only. If you'd like to contribute, but cannot meet the mid-July deadline, we'd still like to hear from you - we hope to collect get as many contributions as possible, from as many countries as possible.

By the way, if Brenton Honeyman approached you with a similar request at the 4th Science Centre Congress earlier this year, this is only a reminder - we're not asking you for two responses! Please just respond to this request.

Can you help? Contact us and let us know.

Meeting at the ASTC Annual Conference

The APEC Science Centre Impact Project will host a breakfast meeting on Tuesday, 18 October 2005, in Richmond, Virginia USA, as part of the ASTC 2005 Conference. This meeting will be by invitation, starting with members of the project's international steering committee. The agenda will include an overview of project activities to date, and discussion of directions for the project for 2006. At this stage, we are asking you to let us know if anyone from your organisation plans to attend the conference - you (as our contact officer), or your CEO or another senior officer. This information will help us to develop an invitation list for the breakfast meeting: we would like to include at least one representative from each APEC economy. We'll also know who to look out for at the conference!

Contact us about your conference plans.

Contact

APEC Science Centre Impact Project Secretariat
Questacon – The National Science and Technology Centre
King Edward Terrace, Canberra ACT 2600, Australia
E apecproject@questacon.edu.au