 Hello, everyone. I'm Keith Webster, the Helen and Henry Posner junior dean of university libraries at Carnegie Mellon, and I'm delighted to welcome you to tonight's event, Citizen Science and Community Data, inspiring engagement between CMU and local communities. We're joined this evening by three CMU leaders who are going to share with us their passion for community focused projects, innovative approaches to engaging communities in collecting and utilizing their own data, and ideas on how those in academia can support community led advocacy. Many thanks to my colleagues at the university libraries who have worked behind the scenes to bring this event to you. Tonight I'm particularly grateful to Sonya Wellington, our events manager, looked after all of the logistics for tonight, our entire external relations team, and our moderator Emma Slaton, our data curation, visualization and GIS specialist in the university libraries. I'm also grateful to our exceptional panelists who will be sharing their insight with you this evening. First, we have Mickey McClassen, a community data scientist at Carnegie Mellon's Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment, better known as Create Lab. He works in partnership with people and organizations across the Pittsburgh region to collect, analyze and visualize data relating to air quality, affordable housing and more. He'll share his experience working directly with community partners to collect data for a variety of initiatives. From the university libraries, we have Said Choudhury, director of the open source programs office. Said brings his expertise using open science to bridge the gap between academic institutions and community organizations, especially in his previous role at Johns Hopkins University. In that role, he launched Johns Hopkins open source programs office, the first of its kind within a US university. Said was also President Obama appointed to the National Museum and Library Services Board and has served on a number of other boards and committees focused on science and data. Finally, we're joined by Alex Hinniger, Director of Sustainability Initiative at Carnegie Mellon. Alex has guided communities from 18 different countries across the globe to understand how their data can be used to combat societal problems. And she now works with the Carnegie Mellon community to incorporate the sustainable development goals into the university's education, research and practices. And I'm very pleased that Alex has found a home in our university libraries. At the end of the evening, you'll have a chance to join in the conversation with a question and answer session. Whether you're currently a faculty member or student here at CMU, an alumnus using your research skills to make a difference, or a community member from Pittsburgh or beyond, we'd love to hear your thoughts on using data science to better center and promote community needs. I'm especially glad to welcome to this evening's event members of our Board of Trustees and leadership and friends and colleagues from peer institutions. We hope that you can use this time to get excited about how we can all come together as a broader community to affect real change. Thank you all again for joining this evening. Without further ado, I'll turn things over to Emma to get the discussion started. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us on this Tuesday evening. In our work at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries to support data education, it's become clear to us that there is a broader need and interest for our students to actively engage with our community partners. Not only do we as researchers recognize that much of the work that we do is founded on data that is provided to us by the community, but we also understand that we have a need to give back to recognize that contribution to our work. So beyond just offering the opportunities like we do at CMU Libraries for community partners to join us and do some skill training to help broaden their data skills, we recognize that it's also important for us as researchers or those who are actively engaging in community partnerships to give back by talking about their work and encouraging others to not only follow their lead, but actively engage with their projects as well as inspire work of their own. As we go through tonight, we'll be hearing from our free panelists, which Keith already lovely introduced. And so as we go through from Mickey's introduction to his work, Said's discussion of his role and Alex's discussion of the sustainability initiative and her other many accomplishments, I'll ask them to start by answering the question. What elements of your role or work involves engaging with the community and bringing to light community voices? And how does that aspect of your role and bring you to CMU and the work that you engage with in our university community as well? So with that, I'll pass it over to Mickey. Take it away. All right. Hi, everybody. Thanks, Emma. So I'll just I'll just briefly introduce myself, talk a little bit about my background and like I can ask what brought me to CMU and so forth and and and tell you a little bit about the work of the organization where where I work now, which is the cradle. So I went to grad school at CMU at Heinz College, which I'm guessing at least somebody, if not many, somebody is on this webinar, you know, also did or are doing right now. I had a great experience at Heinz College. Did that several years ago work before that and in planning for a local government and worked after that in community and economic development through an organization called Fourth Economy, which is based in Pittsburgh, works all over the country and does a lot of work specifically in the Pittsburgh region. But what brought me to Pittsburgh, I mean, I'm sorry, what brought me back to Carnegie Mellon is is a really short answer. It's the Crate Lab. It's the organization where I work now. And the reason that I joined the Crate Lab and absolutely thrilled that I got the opportunity to do so is because Crate is a really fantastic example of a university based group that has long lasting, meaningful partnerships on a variety of different projects with community embedded organizations. Crate's been around for a lot longer than I've been here for about 20 years now. And several of the other lab members that I work with have been around for a lot of that time. And the long list of projects that Crate has developed in partnership with other groups demonstrates the genuine commitment that I think our lab tries to have to doing work that is community oriented and that seeks to benefit not primarily the university, but primarily the community and the partners that we've worked with. Let me just highlight a couple of projects real quickly that our lab works on right now, active projects that Crate is involved in. And then as we go through the panel, I'm happy to discuss any of those or others or just in general to discuss the kind of work that Crate does, if people have questions. So for starters, the Crate lab has a really strong history of working in environmental, in the environmental justice space locally. Specifically, a lot of that work has revolved around air quality. We work in partnership with a variety of different groups that are embedded in communities throughout Allegheny County in the Pittsburgh region to establish the infrastructure, the technical infrastructure needed to collect data about air quality, to publicize and analyze data that is collected through that infrastructure and to advocate around the analysis that comes out of that work for improved air quality in the region. Anna Hoffman and our lab leads that work and that program is, to me, the strongest example I can come up with of what universities should be doing in partnership with community groups. And there's a long history of work to show for it. We also do a lot of work in data visualization. One platform that we developed that is focused on data visualization is called Earth Time. The Earth Time platform has been around for a long time now and it's gotten a lot of play internationally. But we also use it locally. We use it to help local organizations visualize a variety of different locally focused data. And a developer in our lab right now, Harry Hawkins, is working on creating a Pittsburgh specific version of Earth Time that that'll be focused on just that for the Pittsburgh region. A couple of other things to highlight. So we work in partnership with an organization called the Black Equity Coalition. That's a group that was created a few years ago in the immediate aftermath of the COVID pandemic, the outbreak of the COVID pandemic in the U.S. in response to concerns about racial equity in the Pittsburgh region during COVID. We participated in the BEC Black Equity Coalition, BEC Data Justice Working Group, since the onset and have worked in close partnership with others in that group who include representatives from the University of Pittsburgh and a variety of different community groups, nonprofits who come together to look at data to try to advocate around data. And while most of that work over time has focused on advocacy around COVID, we're also starting to look in that group at broader issues of public health and injustice. One other thing I want to highlight. So we work in partnership with the Center for Share Prosperity, which is a new initiative that probably a lot of people on the webinar are already familiar with. I'll not say too much about that yet. But if people have questions about CSP, happy to talk about that. But we work with CSP-led projects to provide technical infrastructure, data visualization, other types of support, and several of our staff members spend a fair bit of time in partnership with CSP projects and the community groups that lead them. Okay, with no further ado, I'm going to throw it to our next panelist here in a second, who I believe is Alex to speak next. But I'll just say happy to take any questions on work. I've done the work that the CREAT-Lab is doing. I've probably done a pretty lousy job of covering the wide variety of stuff that we work on, but totally happy to talk about anything that people have questions about. So Alex, you're up next. Thanks, Mickey. And as you were speaking, I was quietly mapping all of your work to the Sustainable Development Goals, because my name is Alex Kinnaker, and I'm the director of the Sustainability Initiative, which is Carnegie Mellon University's commitment to incorporate the Sustainable Development Goals into our education, research, and practices. If you're not familiar with the Sustainable Development Goals, there are a set of 17 global objectives that all countries agreed to achieve by 2030. And while most people think of sustainability in terms of the environment, the Sustainable Development Goals go beyond the environment to include questions of social equity and economic justice in addition to environmental factors. And at the heart of this agenda in these 17 goals is the concept of equity, and that if not, everyone has access to the resources outlined in the 17 goals, then we haven't sustainably achieved them. What brought me to CMU is that CMU committed to become the first university in the world to report on their alignment with these goals through a voluntary university review. And before coming to Carnegie Mellon University, I actually led New York City's program to use the Sustainable Development Goals to coordinate with the United Nations as well as cities and countries around the world. In fact, I came up with the idea, typically people think of the Sustainable Development Goals as something top-down that comes to the United Nations, but they were actually agreed to following consultations with millions of people around the world over the course of seven years. And there's explicit recognition that cities, academia and the private sector as well as civil society play a really important role. But there's no clear definition of how they can engage. It's considered to be at the country level of the United Nations. So while I was with the City of New York, I said New York City is implementing all of this. We actually are doing the Sustainable Development Goals day in, day out. So I created the concept of a voluntary local review to report on their progress toward these goals and to have a say in how global discussions were happening and what their impact was on the local level. I'm excited to share that since I created the concept of the voluntary local review, more than 300 cities around the world have begun engaging with voluntary local reviews in their local governments in the United States. That includes Pittsburgh, as well as Los Angeles, the state of Hawaii, the city of Orlando, and more cities are looking into it. But what I want to emphasize with the goals is there are 17 goals. There are 169 targets and 252 indicators. And there's a lot of expectation that everyone has to report perfectly on every goal. But I'm a firm believer that these sustainable development goals aren't about comparing vastly different data points in different contexts. Obviously, Pittsburgh is different from Phnom Penh that is different from Kigali that is different from other places. But we can talk about is shared challenges and what we measure and why in order to achieve it. And using the common language of the sustainable development goals, I think that CMU has so much to bring to the conversation, not only in terms of how we are conducting our operations, but also in the ways that we are educating not only our students, but our faculty and staff and the type of research that we're conducting so that we can connect what we're doing both within the university and externally with our partners here in Pittsburgh, in Kigali, in Doha, nationally, internationally, as well as with the private sector, civil society and foundations were increasingly engaged in this work. I want to conclude by saying that I never thought I would be working on a sustainable development goal. As I spend about 15 years working in international development around the world, as Keith mentioned, and what I've seen in every place that I've lived from Pittsburgh to New York City to Phnom Penh to Laos to Lebanon is that if you don't center the perspectives and priorities of the communities with which you're partnering, you will never find a sustainable solution to the challenges that they've identified. And I think that that's really informed my approach to the sustainable development goals both at the city of New York and what I've been doing here at Carnegie Mellon University. And with that, I'll hand it over to Sayid to share a little bit more about what he's working on. Thank you, Alex. Good evening. It's a pleasure to be here. So I will begin by saying that one of the things that drew me to CMU was the Center for Share Prosperity. But I'll talk more about what drew me to CMU at the end of my remarks. My work focuses on supporting data and software systems that translate university based research into different settings and contexts, including local communities. University sometimes approach working with local communities using a perspective or mindset of we are the experts, we're here to solve the problems. I contrast this with a statement made by the Center for Share Prosperity's Executive Director here in the Last Town Hall. He said the overarching mission of CSP is to get agency to the people of Pittsburgh to solve their own problems. Even with the few visits that I've paid to community centers, I've learned a lot simply by listening, I can recall a young man who said I can hustle for a lot of things, but I can't get clothes for an interview. And when I walk in the room with the clothes that I have, they tune me out immediately. Or a homeless person saying it's not enough to know that there's a bed available on a shelter that evening. This person needs a bed by an outlet because they have a medical device. So beyond these anecdotal stories as we scale from the individual to the community, city, nation and even the world, we need to reconsider how we gather, analyze and share data. And building a sense of agencies bolstered where there's trust and transparency. I attended CMU SyLab, after the summit last year, and one of the speakers was the health minister from Sierra Leone, who wisely said, you don't build trust at the moment of an intervention. It requires long term engagement and commitment. So brief aside, some of you may be thinking that community engagement is a matter only for humanists or social scientists. I previously worked with researchers from the National Snow and Ice Data Center who were studying snow and ice data loss, sorry, loss in Northern Alaska. They wanted to speak with village elders who had seen such loss over time. I'm told the researchers showed up and told the elders, we'd like to build the database of your temporal observations. And the village elders apparently said something to the effect of, we're not really sure what you mean, but we're happy to tell you our stories, what we've seen over our lifetimes. That's a form of data. There's tremendous untapped potential value in using more granular, disaggregated, aggregated data and stories directly from our local communities to support the kind of great work that Mickey and Alex have talked about already. And open source software is a pathway for long term engagement with local communities using transparent processes to foster trust. At my previous institution, a group of researchers and library colleagues continue to work with the local community center, the St. Francis Neighborhood Center. They're developing a set of health based interventions, including COVID vaccine drives. A key underpinning of that project is the potential use of a platform called McCourtude, an open source software that's been used successfully to capture data and stories from indigenous communities. A key question is whether McCourtude can become a platform for building community data portals with a sense of agency that operates at national scale. So finally, what drew me to CMU? I have a background in engineering and public policy, so CMU feels like a familiar academic place in many ways. I have deep respect for the CMU libraries and I'm thrilled to be a part of the team. And finally, it's a research intensive university, but it has a service mission at its core at its very history. And I think that's reflected in all the great work of the colleagues that I have on this panel throughout the library, throughout the universities at CSP, but also most importantly, in the citizens of Pittsburgh. So with that, I'll turn it back to Emma, who's going to facilitate a discussion with the panel, which I'm very much looking forward to. Thank you. And thank you to all of our panelists who will invite to return on your videos. I can now see all of your smiling faces. So we'll just jump into some pre prepared questions while we wait for everyone in the audience to jump in with their own as well. Listening to all of your conversations about your work. One thing that became clear is centering a community voice. And much of that focus on community voice also relied on being able to access information so that that voice can be heard. And we've seen this also through the White House Office of Science and Technology. Policy has now announced that data access is the information that we need to get out this year. It's how we need to engage with our communities. So I wondering, for you, what role does access to information or data play in aiding community focused advocacy? I think maybe if we can start with Mickey and talk a bit about the work that you do with local communities here in Pittsburgh. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Emma. So what role does access play? You know, I think data access is is vital. And it's it's important in any number of contexts. But it is also almost always insufficient. Which is not to say that that we shouldn't care about access to data. It's just that we shouldn't only care about access to data. And there are probably a lot of labels for what you know, the other parts of that equation that make this type of work successful. But the the the word for me that is most important beyond access is partnership. It's it's having strong and lasting partnerships with groups that, you know, are founded in trust and allow technical experts to be responsive to the needs of community groups, which are never going to be static, you know, are constantly changing. And you know, I think I think the the story Said that you just that you just tell like we have that you just told it in your introduction there. We have stories, you know, that some version of that translates into any number of different domains that translates into local work. Too often the dynamic that technical experts whether from universities or not bring to the to the table when it comes to data, open data is is access only. It's here here's the data you're welcome. And I think partnerships are the other vital side of that equation. I couldn't agree more Mickey, we really need to make sure that it's not just having that access to the data. It's about how we center that access and the partnerships that can drive from it. And I'm so glad that you referenced Said and your response because I was also going to pass that question over to Said as well, particularly in thinking through your work with communities in terms of gathering data from them as well, but also and then creating these spaces where data can be more accessible. And maybe framing it a bit too. And what Mickey just mentioned about the centering of partnerships is an important aspect in that space. Yeah, I'll turn the mirror on myself for a second if you don't mind. So I spent two years working for the UN in Bangladesh, and I was part of the group called the Flood Action Plan. And we had the ambitious goal of modeling the rivers of Bangladesh. That it remains a solve problem. But I remember running these models in a central office in the capital city of Dhaka, and then hearing reports from the field of people basically going to earth and, you know, kind of embankments and so on poking holes of them. And I would say, why are people doing that? This is why our models don't work. There must be lots of fall, you know, leakage and so on. And they said, well, they're doing it to irrigate their farms, right? So here you have this central office trying to model rivers in Bangladesh. And then on the ground, you have people doing what they do in order to survive. And I think what we find is that when there are shocks to the system, COVID, for example, was certainly a shocking system, there's a gap between well meaning, national, state level policies, actions, allocations, so on, and making it impacting people's lives. I was reminded, you know, of a economics professor I've had who said, you know, for all our modeling and data, don't forget to look for health wanted ads in your local stores and your restaurants. That's a great indicator of what's happening in the economy. So that gap from the national perspective or large scale perspective, dare I say the academic research perspective into everyday lives is a gap we need to address. And I think that has to happen by actually asking people what's on their mind, what the problems are, how they would go about solving them, and then building open transparent systems so they can trust them that we're not gathering your data and doing something, you know, nefarious with it, that we're actually doing something that will help advance the problem you've identified. That's a great point, Sayed. I do think that we need to think about looking to what is it the community needs and listening to them tell us rather than trying to enforce those views there. And I'm so glad to see Alex very excited about that response as well because I was going to turn it to you. So Sayed just mentioned that local information and perspectives are so important in this work as well. We can't just have top down data driven collection needs. And in your introduction, you mentioned how the SDGs, the sustainable development goals can apply both coming down from the UN, but also looking at local partnerships and local commissions to identify ways to address those needs. I thought maybe you could speak a bit on that. Yeah, I just first want to say that one of the reasons I was looking so forward to this conversation is I couldn't agree more with what Mickey and Sayed just said. Totally support it. But I think that what's really interesting about the sustainable development goals is something that a lot of people suffer from is what I term framework fatigue. There are so many frameworks out there and there are so many different ways to approach things and think about data and what you should collect and why. And I don't think I certainly don't think that the sustainable development goals have captured every single thing in every single way. But what is remarkable about them is that they are this universally accepted. Like I can't express to you how incredible it is that 193 countries agreed that open government and peace justice and strong institutions are critical aspects of sustainability. So it's a starting point for us to think about how we talk about these issues and why. But I absolutely absolutely do not think that we should ever go into a community where I go up to someone and say, have you heard about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It's 17 objectives agreed to by all as people that are engaging with these partners. I think the onus owns on us to make that translation between what we recognize are the frameworks that we can use to apply our research or advocacy to other aspects and then determine how we can collect the information at this. So for example, in the city of New York, when I did the voluntary local review, I wasn't going out and asking New Yorkers what they thought about the sustainable development goals. I was asking our city agency partners, I think that you're contributing to this, this and this. And this is the way you're engaging with your constituents. And I helped look at the policy, the overall policy about how they were measuring engagement. It was not my responsibility to go out and engage with the different communities across New York for this. And I think it's really important to remember that as excited as we may be about these frameworks, they're not universally acknowledged by everyone and we don't need to apply them that way. So true. And I think the exactly right, it relates back to what Mickey is saying about listening to local partners and centering their perspectives and how we think about not only data accessibility or data collection, but also how people end up using the information that researchers provider that they collect themselves. And so since we've just been talking about centering our community partners voices, I'm wondering if you might be able to share some of your experience working with community partners and maybe discuss the most unique or positive example of a project you have that involves a community partner or community collected data for citizen science collaboration. Perhaps maybe Alex, do you want to go just based on your experience in working with New York or one of the other locations you mentioned earlier? Sure. I think something that is actually informed my entire approach and worldview is working on the international campaign to ban landmines. Here's a situation where we had governments in Geneva saying that landmines were a critical weapon of their arsenal. They absolutely needed to be used to win worse so on and so forth in the 90s. But the people living in the countries where the landmines were being deployed said actually the vast majority of casualties are civilians. Civilians are suffering from this. They're not militarily useful and you're not reaching your objectives by harming civilians. So what happened was the international campaign got together, collected information and stories from all of these different countries where landmines were used, brought it to the decision makers and said, you know, this isn't the reality on the ground. This is actually what's happening. They partnered together with supportive governments. Canada took this on, developed the Ottawa process to ban landmines and we now have an international treaty banning this weapon and it's used by only the worst of the regimes these days. And that's because the people impacted by landmines stood up and said, this is how it's, this is how it's impacting us and we are going to be part of the conversation. And it was really important in that case, not only for them to be part of it, but to recognize the role that different actors could play. So we had supportive national governments. We had the United Nations agencies that were able to facilitate the technical expertise. We had civil society in terms of the people living in the countries that were impacted. And we had civil society in countries like the United States advocating in Washington DC for them to take part in these conversations and understand what was going on in the ground. And that was that was really impactful for me. And that's always the reference point when I go back to when I think about how tough things are and how important it is to keep at it to actually make meaningful change. Definitely. And building off of that example, mentioning the involvement of several different levels of institutions. So we're talking about local governments or other active agents, maybe some federal involvement. And it reminds me say it of when you were talking about the different levels of involvement or engagement at an institution level to the places that are collecting data, you mentioned your project in Bangladesh, but you also mentioned your work in Johns Hopkins. So I'm wondering if you also have an interesting project you'd like to expand more on as an example of a fun or impactful way that communities were able to actually impact the data that they live with. Yeah, and I will talk about the project to Johns Hopkins, but I'll give a reference point to something that I've learned about the Center for Shared Prosperity and Work in Pittsburgh. And I think, you know, maybe you're probably involved in this around the monitoring of air pollution and alligating County and, you know, as you say, providing ways to visualize that data. But I read in one of the articles that even though masks and filters and so on are the offer for free, there's a reluctance to actually take advantage of those interventions or, you know, sort of responses. A parallel, if you will, metaphor in Baltimore was there was reluctance to take COVID vaccines in this community center, even though we said Hopkins is willing to come and a physician is willing to administer these to you. And I'm not picking on my former institution. I think this is true of many universities. There's a serious lack of trust and a fractured relationship with some community members and the university. And it's just a historical fact that some of the medical researchers at Hopkins previously experimented or did, you know, treatments without consent and so on. So that story is passed down from generation to generation. And that's what you're up against. So what we did in this project instead was the researchers started having this, you know, reading group monthly reading group, any in the communities invited to join. And everyone was treated as a peer and an equal. And this, you know, not only is about knowledge sharing and transfer and so on, but it's just getting to know each other. And then one of the researchers held a series of data literacy workshops at the community center went there and said, this is the data. This is how you might want to read this. This is generally important. And then the Hopkins position showed up with the COVID vaccines. And I remember one community member actually saying, I'm not even here for the vaccine. I'm just here to see a Hopkins doctor. I never thought I'd see a Hopkins doctor in my life. So getting to that point takes a lot of effort and sort of unlearning what you think you may know. And with this, so, you know, here's the data, here's the analysis, why would you not take advantage of this? It's really important to unpack all these complicated issues. Absolutely. And I think it's back to the same idea that's been coming up continually in that we need to listen to what the community needs. And what projects they're most interested in engaging which was I think, and also you into that site is the goal of the Center for Shared Prosperity. How do we bring the Pittsburgh community to be full partners with the work that we're doing at Carnegie Mellon as researchers? And speaking of CSP, I'm interested, Mickey, to hear about any projects that you're working on with them. That might be interesting. I know you mentioned earlier, the programs on air quality that say it also referenced as well as working with the community for Black equity. Do you have another example you might want to share? Yeah, so just briefly on CSP, there are several in the language of CSP launch projects that have started over the last now year and a half. CSP for me is a and let me just say it again, Center for Shared Prosperity, the Center for Shared Prosperity, CSP, sorry for using the abbreviation, but that is a really interesting model for how a university might relate to the community around it. And it's just getting started. So there are several projects that have, you know, kicked off many more to come. There's a CSP is led by what's called the Center Community Committee or C3, which is a group of representatives that meet regularly to come up with these these project ideas and advance them and, you know, try to understand how in any given case, a project could create systemic change in the local community. And the idea that a university could be kind of a canvas for that without and a support agent in that without dictating what those projects end up being or how they, you know, how they progress, for me is where the really exciting elements of CSP lie. And I think that's a that's a genuinely new thing that you don't see in many other university contexts. But like I said, it's also it's also new and and it's like being created as we talk, you know, this this year is a big year for CSP as well next year be when when some of these projects that have just started to launch come into really come into being in stronger ways. And and I think probably the message that's important for the audience of this webinar, if you are local, if you're in Pittsburgh, if you're part of the CMU community, now is a great time to get involved in that work if that's something that you're interested in. And to help shape what some of those projects look like, what the what those relationships with community organizations look like and so forth. And then briefly on the black equity coalition. So the BC is a group that is also really, I think, an interesting model for a collaborative organization. It was not, it was kind of the opposite of CSP in one way. CSP was the product of a lot of thought. It was it was the product of smart people sitting down and saying like, how can we do things differently and better? And BC was the product of urgent need in a crisis. It was it was the product of a pandemic that was novel to everyone experiencing it and very legitimate fear around what that might mean for equity in this region, what it might mean for equitable health outcomes in this region. And you know, it's kind of interesting to be involved in two different things that have had very different origin stories in that way, but which both have similar strengths in terms of the depth of relationships that that they have fostered the role that you know, and especially the role that universities play in both of those organizations, not that it's the same role, but in both cases, the university is not deciding what happens. And that that's that's, I think, a model that CMU hit other schools in Pittsburgh and schools around the world can should seek to emulate to be partner without being in charge. Absolutely. And I think from what we've heard from everyone on this panel, it's exciting that we get to be here at CMU where these programs are developing and we can really make some of that change happen. And I just want to highlight again, could you also check out the link to the Center for Shared Prosperity page in the chat right now, because as Mickey mentioned, there are projects, there might be projects you want to recommend. So please do engage with that. And speaking about hearing from the community or directly giving your input to that, I think it's time for us to move on to some of our community questions from everyone who's joined us tonight. And one of the questions that I see is for Mickey. And it is basically asking, do you work with public libraries within or around Pittsburgh to affect data-driven community initiatives relating to social equity and allied aspects? Yeah, I'm in the minority of people on this panel who do not work at a library in some form or fashion. So I might not be a perfect person to answer that question. But I think public libraries in Pittsburgh, public libraries anywhere are a vital resource to a community. In Pittsburgh, that's especially true because of the strength of the library system locally. I have done some work through the Allian County Library Network to in my past role to make libraries physical space available for a variety of different programmatic functions. I think libraries are one example of what could be many different types of community scale institutions, where there is an opportunity to better utilize existing physical spaces, digital infrastructure, and just institutional knowledge networks in any type of project that involves mobilizing a community or disseminating information to a community. I think libraries are a great example of an institution that's good at doing that, and they're not alone on that list. Thanks for the question. And I think that was a great answer. And I mean, as someone who works in libraries myself, always excited to hear when people are wanting to engage with us. And I wonder if I could pass that over then to to you say to someone who's had a long history of working in libraries, what do you feel the role of libraries is in this space? Yeah, I actually go in refer to experiences. I think he mentioned that I was on the National Museum and Library Services Board for a time. And one of the really wonderful aspects of being on that board is providing the National Service Awards to libraries and museums. So we would receive applications from a wide variety of libraries throughout the country. So I had an opportunity to see public libraries, research libraries, you name it, and museums and galleries and so on. And just to echo and reinforce Mickey's point that so many of these spaces are community centers in their own way, gathering spaces where people are doing job applications, you know, interview skills, whatever you want to, you know, you need to get the job. And they do provide those kinds of, I would call the central services. But that's a pathway to more of the information type of services or literacy that we're talking about on this panel, right, is that you may come in for one particular function. That's a great pathway or an opportunity to say, hey, are you aware that, you know, you may be interested in this job, but these are things you might want to know about this particular topic. Or there are other kinds of topics that may be of interest to you. And I don't, you know, put Alex on the spot or tell them what to say or so on, but the whole sustainability space that are in the county event libraries to me is a great example of how research libraries can play that role as well. So I see her nodding. So maybe I'll just stop, jump in. Well, just to add to that, when I applied for the job at the city of New York back in 2017, they asked me to bring in an example of how we could amplify sustainable development goals in New York City. And I said public libraries and rolled out a whole sample strategy for how we could do this with public libraries. Of course, I was based in the International Affairs Office. And I'm not sure if I emphasize enough that CMU in 2019, the provost came to New York and I heard him speak about CMU's commitment to the sustainable development goals. And that's actually what made me think, maybe it's time for me to see what's happening in higher ed with these additional opportunities with education and research. And over the past two years, this has been a provost's priority, but he together with Dean Webster recognized the central role that the university libraries play across campus as a convening place as a source of information for current collections and also archival information. So it's a perfect spot for us to set up the sustainability studio, which is a place for students, faculty, staff, alumni, and the Pittsburgh community to come together to learn about the sustainable development goals and to do various activities and participate in different sorts of convenings to identify how their work is related to these goals and how they can connect with other partners within and outside of the university to help advance this agenda. And I just love being in the libraries because I'm surrounded by people who are incredibly knowledgeable and very passionate about sharing it. So every time someone comes to me with a question, I've mapped everything to the sustainable development goals and I can find the relevant partner, whether it's a faculty member, a staff member, another teacher to see how they can help answer the questions that someone may have that are related to the relevant sustainable development goals. Yeah, absolutely. I have the same enthusiasm about working in libraries and I also so enjoy that a lot of the content that we make available for our students and faculty here at CME was equally available to the community and we'll plug some workshops that anyone from the community can attend later as well. But thinking about the libraries as a partner in this process, it makes me wonder about other partnerships and we did talk about focusing less on here's the data and more on here's how we can work together with the data or better understand it based on community needs. But we do have a question from the chat that wonders if we might be able to further describe how partnerships work. Does it include data interpretation and guidance, offering implications and impacts of what data reveals? Does it involve working with data education? Are there other components of a partnership that it's important for community members to know when they're looking to connect? Anybody want to jump in on that question or should I call names? You know, okay, I'm careers Nikki. Yeah, I know you and I have talked a lot about the need for building data visualization skills in the community. And you mentioned something earlier that a lot of the ways that you focus on building partnerships or letting the community in on some of the content that has been developed through partnerships is through communication and data visualization. Do you want to maybe talk about partnerships at that level as well? Yeah, sure. Thanks. Thanks again for that question. I think that's that's important too often in these sorts of contexts we can we kind of like skirt by on vague words, you know, partnerships and community and things that sound nice, but are hard when you get into the details and partnership is a great example of that because it's not it's not easy to be a good partner when it comes to technical work. I don't think there's a short answer. I think it's it's at the risk of sounding like I'm ducking the question. I think it's all of the above to a certain extent, right? Sometimes it's it's being a good partner. If you're coming from a technical space like the university and you're working with the organization without a lot of technical capacity, you know, I think sometimes what it what it looks like is partly educational and partly, you know, like just providing providing services like you need you have this data and you need some sort of visual representation of it. Let me work with you to understand what that you expected to look like and try to provide you with something that's useful to your purposes. That's a that's a form of partnership, for sure. I think good partnerships, good organizational partnerships are built on shared interest and are involved a genuine reciprocity of skills and information knowledge. If the dynamic is we at the university have you know, technical skills and knowledge, and we are here to bestow them upon you, great, you know, graciously bestow them upon you community organizations, then we are approaching this work. Not just not just wrong wrongly from a moral perspective, we're missing an opportunity to do work better, you know, to learn, which is theoretically the you know, a pretty central focus of most universities, at least on paper, right, to learn. And I think I think that is the harder part of partnership to really do honestly. But but I you know, I think that's that has to be part of the mix to a genuine exchange of knowledge and ideas. Let us work through this thing together and I have certain skills and backgrounds and you have certain skills and backgrounds in between the two of us. We we make a better team. You know, that's what partnership is in any context. And there's no reason why it should be different when it comes to working with data. Absolutely. And I say, did you want to add something as well? I was just going to follow up. But if you have a comment, I can wait till. Oh, please go ahead. Yeah, I truth be told, when I told my graduate advisor, I was going to work in the library. He said, well, why? Because I was in engineering and program. And I said, well, you said to me early on when I said, what am I supposed to do in grad school? He said, I don't want you to figure out a particular set of things. I want you to learn how to learn. And what I said to him was, I can't think of a better organization that helps you learn how to learn on the library. And he said, well, nicely done. Good luck. Have a good career. So I think libraries are really wonderful places to help people explore data, information, services, people, resources, you name it, collections. And there's no agenda. Like nobody walks into a library and is told, you must come to this conclusion, you must come to this answer. It's very much helping you navigate that. But to do so in a way that reflects sound methods and, you know, solid principles and ethics and values and so on. And then to amplify that through a network of libraries and library and information science schools and so on. And that's not only in terms of the content and the way you navigate the content, but it's also the infrastructure, right? And my dog has an opinion on those topics, obviously. But if you think about that kind of McCarty platform I was talking about, a series of community data portals. Are libraries potentially the place to provide the infrastructure for those? So I think that kind of network effect is something libraries can bring into the fix as well. No, absolutely. And I think to both those points, having worked in libraries just in six years also coming from a research background where my PhD supervisor was very surprised I was moving into libraries but making the jump for the same reasons as I want to help people better understand and access information about their lives. It's something that we can think about how places that are focused on education function and actually provide a service and provide support to some of those partnership elements that you were talking about Mickey as well and how can we help education get out as that should be the role of a university. But thinking about people coming from outside the university, Alex, I'm interested to hear about aspects that you've worked in for these kind of partnership networks and how that can relate to education or other roles and partnerships. Sure. One other area where I'm working using the Sustainable Development Goals regionally is as a member of the steering committee of Discover, which is a network of organizations, about three dozen organizations convened by Sustainable Pittsburgh that are going through every single Sustainable Development Goals target to determine how the these groups regionally are contributing to each of the targets and how do we define success in each of these targets. It's been a series of long meetings over several years in order to ensure that everyone's perspective is heard and that the local priorities of our partners here in Pittsburgh are reflected in the targets that we talk about when we talk about the Sustainable Development Goals in this region. And I think that that's really helpful to ensure that we are able to communicate with local organizations using this common language of the Sustainable Development Goals because at CMU we're increasingly looking at it internally and also there are opportunities with the city of Pittsburgh, which I mentioned is published to voluntary local reviews and other cities, states and countries around the world. And I just I want and I'm excited to share there was a question about foundations that the Pittsburgh Foundation is actually supporting our work and there are lots more community foundations, including the Cleveland Foundation, the Central Florida Foundation and a few others that are actually internally looking at how the Sustainable Development Goals can be a tool for them to determine when and how they prioritize their funding and how they identify future potential grantees. Yeah, excellent. I think you're you're hitting the nail on the head here, Alex, that a lot of this work is just beginning, not only in terms of how we think about the SCGs and apply them to community partnerships, but also if we look internally at CMU with the new initiatives that Mickey were mentioning coming out of the Center for Shared Prosperity. This is all an exciting time where things are happening and we can actually engage and take that ownership as people who are invested in supporting community missions. And speaking of thinking through the future of how community partnerships and citizen science are going to work within the context of CMU, I'm wondering if any of our panelists have thoughts on where this is heading in the next five years. How can CMU evolve to better work with community partners to support access to data or education that can help citizen science advocacy? Yeah, I'll start. I think to everything you've heard on this panel and much, much more, of course, about the university, CMU is doing a wonderful job. And I agree with Mickey. This is not typical for universities to have communities as true and equal partners. I'd love to see over the next five years and I believe it will happen that it moves from gathering data or sort of working with communities to figure out what the data are, the problems are, to actively including them in solving those problems, right? So it isn't this process of here's the data, here's the problem and then we go off and do all the analysis and give them back to you. But rather, there's a shared sense of solving the problems together through data analytics and all kinds of things. And to do that in true partnership with the community. What about you, Mickey, next five years? What's going to happen? Yeah, the thing that I would most like to see happen in the next five years, so that's maybe a slightly different answer than the question. But the thing I would most hope will happen. And I also think it will happen is that the student population of CMU, which is already to some extent an engaged student population in the local community, will become more so. I mean, I think it will be harder to be a student at CMU and to not have, at least in your face, opportunities to be engaged in the community around you and in a meaningful way through, you know, whatever it is that you're studying in school. I think that I'm not saying that doesn't exist now, but I think that will exist more and more prominently in the next five years. And I'm very hopeful about that. I think that would be a really, really, that would be, that would be an enormous thing for the university to achieve. If it can, to a significant degree, more strongly engaged students through their academic work, through other opportunities in the community around the university. And just to piggyback on that, I think I remember you mentioning that there might be some open internships or opportunities for students to get involved even now. Did you want to mention that briefly or? Yeah, sure. If you're a student on this call and you're interested in doing this type of work, feel free to talk to me directly. The CREATE Lab often has interns. The Center for Share Prosperity also works with undergrad students to place them in different support roles for the projects that are going through the Center for Share Prosperity. So there already exists lots of opportunities to get engaged if you are a CMU student right now. Great. All right. And then Alex, next five years. What are we hoping for? What are we seeing? Well, in partnership with the work that Mickey and Saeed just mentioned, I'm hoping that our colleagues at CMU think more comprehensively about the impact of their work beyond the specific topic that they're working on and the sustainable development goals can be a way to unlock those conversations, not that everyone has to be addressing all 17 goals and they're looking at their objectives for their research or engagement, but rather thinking through the, you know, you're focusing clean water and sanitation. How is that related to sustainable cities and communities? Good health and well-being. How is that related to quality education? And having an understanding of how those different parts fit together, I think will only make us all stronger students, researchers, and members of the community. I'd be remiss not to mention the nexus on civic engagement, which I am a part of, which is a new initiative by Carnegie Mellon University to strengthen community engagement between the university students as well as faculty and staff and our partners in the Pittsburgh community. And I think that they're a great resource for people looking to get engaged in the Pittsburgh community as well. Absolutely. And I love that we're coming to the close on action items that people can take away. And I have a couple more action items for everyone. But first, I want to thank all of our panelists for being a part of this wonderful event. I know that I've learned a lot about ways that I can do more to be a better partner to the CMU community by learning from all of you. And I look forward to having more conversations on these topics moving forward. I also want to thank everyone again, who put time into planning this event and to everyone who attended. But just to let you know that there are other ways that you can continue to engage with us on the topic of community data and citizen science being full partners with our efforts here. One of those is through a series of workshops that will be happening at the Carnegie Mellon University Libraries. Now, we've talked about libraries as a center for education. Well, here's some ways that you can actively learn. Those workshops are going to be made available for anyone in the community to attend. You just have to register and they're free. So I hope to see some of you all at those events. Other events that are coming up through the libraries include three minute thesis where you can also learn not only how our students might be engaging with the community, but the research that our students are doing more broadly through their studies. It's three and two is an internationally recognized celebration of research that challenges PhD students to present a compelling oration on their thesis and its significance in three minutes and in language that anyone can understand. So again, it's a great way to talk about how students can speak to the community. It's the event is happening on Tuesday, February 28th. And see me, PhD students representing a variety of research areas will take part on the stage to discuss these topics and even possibly win cash prizes. So the event is also free much like the workshops and is open to the public. It's also a hybrid event with an in-person and virtual option for attendance. And you can find a registration link in the chat to that now. Finally, you can tell that the libraries are very invested in building connections between the university and the community through workshops through events like 3MT. But if you would like to support us in those efforts, please consider giving a gift to the CMU Library's Dean's Discretionary Fund. There's a link provided in the chat. Your donations can strengthen our vital role as a convener of interdisciplinary activities and a central gathering place for the CMU community to have on campus wide conversations and conversations that also include our community partners. With that, again, thank you very much for attending this event and I hope you all have a pleasant evening.