Developing Communities of Practice to Maximize the Usability and Impact of Clean Sport Education in Europe: IMPACT Project

Abstract

Over the last decade, the European Commission, the World Anti-Doping Agency and the International Olympics Committee have made significant investments for the development of evidence-based anti-doping education. Although this is an important step towards eliminating doping in amateur and professional, elite sport, still most of the existing projects operate in a fragmented manner and there is a considerable lack of synergies. Consequently, there has been little consideration of effective ways to manage and sustain the knowledge created in this area in ways that will further maximize and sustain the usability and impact of existing anti-doping education initiatives. For this purpose, project IMPACT was developed in order to deliver, for the first time, multi-stakeholder Communities of Practice for Clean Sport Education across Europe. Through the implementation of face-to-face and web-based communities of practice, IMPACT will provide a knowledge management framework that will transform existing anti-doping educational resources into meaningful, timely, and sustainable tools, and stimulate the generation of innovative anti-doping educational solutions. This will be achieved through a strategic partnership between academic experts in anti-doping research and online education, and international and national sport stakeholders (i.e., sport associations; anti-doping agencies; organizations for doping prevention in amateur sports).