Participate in an EPSCoR Broader Impacts Town Hall
Facilitated through the University of South Dakota, NSF-funded virtual town halls along with other meetings are being organized to explore creating an integrated Gateway for Education, Training, Broader Impacts and Outreach for Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) jurisdictions.
This anticipated gateway would provide infrastructure for researchers, educators, students, project managers, and the general public to access, create, and share information about broader impacts activities and resources.
During the town hall, you will identify with colleagues what you consider the most pressing hurdles or obstacles to achieving Broader Impact so that we can then focus our energies on those key targets.
Register for one of two Broader Impacts Town Halls (to be held via a Zoom call) at 1:00-2:30 P.M. Central Standard Time (CST) on Monday, December 14, ~or~ Tuesday, December 15, 2020. You will be redirected to Knowinnovation’s website.
More About the Town Halls
The EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Track-1 (RII Track-1) awards support improvements to cyberinfrastructure and human capital development in research areas. This project has the potential to elevate the visibility and importance of broader impact activities — and their intertwined research activities — in a scalable, transformative way.
The focus of this town hall is to: 1) identify the Broader Impacts (BI) and outreach needs of the EPSCoR community; 2) evaluate current BI platforms as well as identify, introduce, and evaluate other BI resources and tools from well-established groups and; 3) identify what functionality gaps may exist in the current BI platforms that are required by the EPSCoR community.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) places great importance on the communication of science and its potential to benefit society. Broader Impacts (BI) are of great importance but also pose many challenges to those seeking opportunities as well as for researchers planning and implementing programs, such as:
finding and sharing resources (funding, infrastructure and personnel);
locating and collating information that is diverse, widespread and presented in a variety of ways;
lack of technical expertise and infrastructure for creating websites, videos, integrating applications such as social media, survey tools and analytic tools;
disseminating information and interacting with large, distributed groups;
meeting recruitment initiative goals to broaden participation and building collaborations in unfamiliar communities; and
measuring success and promoting and highlighting successful projects.
These town halls have the potential to result in a robust infrastructure to support the development, dissemination, and sharing of BI activities and resources.