Characterizing the Landscape of Informal Physics Activities that are Supported by Universities, National Physics Laboratories and Centers in the United States

Many individual physicists, physics students, and broader physics institutions engage in physics outreach with the public as well as support other types of informal physics learning. As a field, however, we do not have a holistic picture of the landscape of these outreach efforts and the resources, time, and personnel that go into doing this work. Thus, we are unable to leverage these collective efforts or to understand the full impact on participants, both the public audiences and the physicists involved. Here we discuss a new project to systematically describe the "who, where, when, how, and why" of the informal physics programs that we engage in. Survey, interview, and site visit data from informal physics events, programs, and activities are being collected and analyzed to 1) produce a taxonomy of informal physics and 2) reveal the structural and cultural practices that support these environments. We will share preliminary efforts as to program identification, data collection, and analysis. We also put forth a call to join the project and contribute to the study.