znanost.org
Society znanost.org is a NGO operating mainly in Croatia. Its main focus is in promoting education, science and knowledge-based values. The word znanost in Croatian means "science".
Governance
- Damir Kovačić - current president
- Hrvoje Meštrić - current vice-president
- Executive board members: Slaven Garaj, Ana Bedalov, Damir Kovačić (president), Hrvoje Meštrić (vice-president), Petar Mimica, Duje Bonacci, Vladimir Ivković
- Project council: Damir Kovačić, Petar Mimica
- Executive Director: Ana Bedalov
Alumni
- Mario Jurić
- Dejan Vinković
- Branimir Lukić
History
znanost.org was founded in February 2002 by a group of a recent graduates from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. Activities during the first year and a half of operation were mostly limited to providing popular science texts. The first major step towards a broader public engagement was the participation in organization of the First Croatian Science Festival for the Croatian national daily newspaper Vjesnik.
[1]. The society was contracted by the organizers (Technical Museum in Zagreb, British Council Croatia and the former Croatian Ministry of Science and Technology, since early 2004 part of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports) to build a web site and help organize media coverage for the event.
Activities
Projects include:
- Connect::Portal - free and independent Internet news site, and one of the leading Croatian public news media covering science and technology policy
- connect - Croatian professional network of scientists, experts, educators and students
- Nebo na poklon - educational outreach project
- Astrophysical Initiative in Dalmatia - comprehensive program of creating an astrophysics centre of excellence in Dalmatia
- INDECS - Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems, a scientific journal
A scientific paper Towards quantitative tools for analysing qualitative properties of virtual communities [2] published in INDECS 2(2) contains a simple quantitative analysis of the inner dynamics of znanost.org between March 2003 and January 2004.
See also
- Nebo na poklon (Presenting the Skies), education project