Creating a Community for Outreach: FunSize Physics

Funsizephysics [1] is a website built to communicate the excitement of physics to a broad audience and to provide a central repository for tried and true outreach activities. The contributors are scientists who write engaging articles for the public about their own ground-breaking research, making it unique among science websites. We discuss the lessons learnt, the future plans, the successes and the failures in the first few years of operation. Because the rate of new contributions has always been a stumbling block, in the last two years we have made a concerted effort to encourage scientists to use science writers' descriptions of their own research as an initial rough draft. This helps in overcoming the initial hesitation and has been somewhat successful. We are making an effort to expand the Funsizephysics community by creating a Board of Ambassadors to spread the word, give us feedback and author contributions. Among our successes, is the inclusion of Funsize in a list of the 13 Best Science Blogs [2], commenting that it is among "the most modern physics blogs".