Alternative ways of connecting IT researchers with target public audiences

PANEL SUMMARY There is a growing need for the CPR community to connect to a variety of public audiences in furtherance of communicating IT personnel research: students (K-12, undergraduate and graduate), parents, teachers, guidance counselors, practitioners, policy makers (others?). There are both practical and scholarly reasons why the CPR community would want to communicate its research results more broadly. The publication of our research in SIGMISCPR proceedings and the ACM digital library is not be the only effective way to reach our audience; many have no access to them. At the initial stages of planning any research study, we need to incorporate dissemination strategies. We need ask the following questions: Who are our target audiences and how are we going to reach them? Who will be responsible for the dissemination effort? What are our dissemination goals? What resources are available? Finally, did our dissemination effort produce the intended results?