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As the International Year of Crystallography is going on, the crystallographic community is actively involved in a number of activities and events to connect crystallography and society. The European Area, where the seminal discoveries took place, combines the traditional out-reach activities carried out during the last few years with several new activities to make crystallography and crystallization attractive to the public in general. The crystal growing competitions, involving high schools, organized since 2008 in Spain, are in 2014 very popular in the ECA Area. Since 2011, a Summer Scientific Campus has been held at the University of Oviedo in which the students develop a research project that incorporates crystallography as the core theme (X-Ray diffraction in the Forensic Science, Crystallisation and Mineralogy Workshops) [1]. An extension of that is the Spanish program for IYCr2014 "Science, Crystals and Society" [2]. For the European activities, the ECA Executive Committee created the IYCr2014 Coordination Committee, to gather initiatives in the ECA area and to be a link with the IUCr worldwide supervision of IYCr2014. "Discovering", "Getting involved" and "Communicating" are the three key points to connect scientists and society. The main objective of this project is to integrate and disseminate the science of crystallography into the European society, particularly among students, boosting the European dimension of the Project. "Discovering", "Getting involved" and "Communicating" are the three key points that will connect scientists and society. This European platform (http://www.iycr2014.eu) and the associated social networks content are the European links between crystallography and society using a number of tools: A dedicated IP/TV, ITunesU Chanel, or the Google Course Builder tool platform. Acknowledgements: Financial support from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad de España (MAT2010-15094, Factoría de Cristalización-Consolider Ingenio 2010) and ERDF.
abstracts
New technologies offer an emerging framework to spread scientific knowledge. New sites based on different platforms (blogs, websites, youtube channels, etc.) are born everyday with an informative and educational spirit. The success of such proposals lies in an increasingly growing interest of the general publicusing these tools as an easy, convenient and funnyway to share information. These technologies contribute to spread and promote the participation in the IYCr2014 activities by supporting all the activities organized under the IYCr2014 [1,2] in Spain,accessing an ever wider audience through the network. First, we have created an own website: www.iycr2014.info where all the information about the different activities (national and international) of the IYCr2014 are being posted. This website has a TV channel available where some events (workshops, exhibitions, conferences, activities for school children or public engagement events) are broadcasted. Both, website and TV channel, are being supported by means of the most popular social networks: facebook and tweeter. Besides, some of our actions are designed by the use of different network tools. As selected running activities, we shall present the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) [3] about crystallization and crystallography. This course is builtby using an accessible language andwas thought to support Crystallization in the School Project. A second example is the Mobile application to the project: Sands of the world. This very complex project needs worldwide collaboration to collect samples of sand from as many beaches as possible around the world. A third application is the Online development of competitions such as The most relevant molecule in SpanishCrystallography and The Round Robin-Crystal phase identification. Acknowledgements: Financial support from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad de España (MAT2010-15094, Factoría de Cristalización - Consolider Ingenio 2010) Figure: QR codes of the website (left) and the MOOC (right)
