 With the field of public interest technology expanding and the number of opportunities students can get involved in the field also growing, one of the first fundamental building blocks into a successful pipeline of students to PIT practitioners is first an opportunity to allow students at scale to explore themselves both their skill sets maybe it's their background in development in design and ethics policy-making community building as well as their identities what problems resonate with them how they work well within a team how they don't work well within a team how they interact with stakeholders how what communities that they want to see themselves help you know catalyze change in what communities that they view themselves are already personally in and how they can contribute exploring these various parts of a student's identity is very crucial for even a student to begin even thinking about what field they want they see themselves in what type of organization or institution or industry they see themselves in how they see themselves within that industry that field that organization all of these questions is first an understanding of themselves what we view as the biggest contribution and Blumen can make is providing this opportunity at scale providing the opportunity for students to explore all these facets about them within a structured environment within a competitive fun incentivized environments that also allows them one to both be connected with a community of like-minded peers who are also trying to enact change to be provided enough support by the field of public interest technology to allow them to truly understand how to think about problems how to think about communities how to think about working with stakeholders in the way that public interest public interest technologies do but doing so while also allowing themselves to explore what the problem that they've identified in their local community whether that's in the university for the education competitions or whether that's you know broader social impact problems with the social impact competitions it's this environment that is free enough to to explore policy initiatives projects programs utilize your unique skill sets understand their identity the communities that they're interested in the problems they're interested in solving and by going through this process through Blumen and by creating a pipeline of exploration at the student level for them to understand themselves and what they can do and then that new knowledge then allowing them to see themselves within the field of public interest technology within the currently available opportunities maybe at government local communities organizations institutions corporations or through the network they built by competing in the competition through the team they made through the new knowledge that they've gained through the through the tacit knowledge of working with stakeholders maybe they can then and leverage this these new found discoveries to then just pursue various social entrepreneurship endeavors various public interest ventures that don't necessarily exist within the current opportunities within the current environments Blumen aims to do this Blumen aims to help students navigate this winding path of the public interest technology field by allowing themselves to explore the field while also exploring themselves while also doing so all within a welcoming safe and educational environment that they can use to propel their careers or in future endeavors in a wide variety of ways and recognizing that through this expanding field we cannot identify you know at the outset all the different opportunities that are available to the student so we want to allow the students themselves to really navigate that field and understand where they see themselves within the field and how they can best uniquely contribute Blumen will offer two different types of immersive educational experiences the first being the competitions themselves when students and individuals are further embedding themselves within a community working together in a team identifying problems proposing solutions and then navigating the complex nature of working with very stakeholders to make progress on the solution we view this in it of itself the competition as an immersive educational experience and one that augments the space from what can normally be taught in the traditional classroom environment or more structured internship and fellowship opportunities the second immersive educational experience we hope to offer with Blumen is by leveraging what we've learned from the previous competitions and also leveraging the outcomes and what the participants of the competitions have learned creating each competition for a future community to become digital assets and digital educational experiences that a future PIT newcomer students or early professional or incumbents already who wants to learn how did people approach solving this problem what were the types of communities involved what were the methodologies used people can not in real time be a part of that same competition but really learn from what's all the participants in that competition in a previous competition learned and then leverage that new knowledge to either compete in a future competition or propel their own initiatives whether entrepreneurially or within an organization they're already embedded in but it's really this idea of both creating real-time immersive educational experiences with the competitions themselves and also digital assets that can be accessed by people in the future related back to the competition and that they can learn from and then leverage that new knowledge to do something else in the world built into the design of Blumen is our ability to scale from the outset our first education competition is restricted to us universities but within that subset of education institutions we are not restricted on the number of students that can participate and we're not restricted on the number of us universities that can participate in that competition same thing with the social impact competition although we're only dealing with one social impact problem we're not restricted on the number of competitors who want to compete after that problem has been identified in a topic area is being pursued this is largely due to the way our competitions are designed and we allocate capital and decide winners it is 100% community driven and doesn't require some type of restrictive top-down funnel that hinders progress and hinders the amount of people who want to be a part of the competition at the competitor level now at the institution level and how we expand from just us universities to US community colleges and then expand to the international higher education and then going back to to high school this scale this expansion is one how do we then become more efficient as a team and as a digital infrastructure provider that allows the communities to then propel and keep forward these types of competitions that's that can touch as many people as possible in various different educational environments and then on the social impact competition side it is how do we then create networks and get awareness from a specific social impact problem to other social impact problems such that we can go and find that community get mentors who are who are deeply embedded with that problem with that community and run more social impact competitions at an accelerating pace and scale and schedule such that more people who are you are involved in different social impact problem areas or who have different problem areas that they want to be a part of can have an opportunity to be a part of Blumen and be a part of our competitions as we continue to grow and expand the number of competitions in the topic areas that we are focused on Blumen will help the university network advance the field of public interest technology by offering a foundational baseline opportunity for students across discipline across universities across educational attainment levels to first see and embed themselves within a public interest technology environment learn about stakeholder driven innovation learn what it means to build with not for various communities by competing in the competition themselves and by creating this foundational offering an opportunity for students across the country across the globe to be a part of that is not constrained by specific class size by specific university or geography we can then leverage this platform to become the pipeline for individuals students and people just interested in learning about public interest technology to one see the competitions see what the university network else what we else have to offer and also see how we can leverage all of these resources into the actual field of public interest technology and the career paths that are available for them so all of my predictions of where the field will be in two five and ten years time all stem from current transit initiatives that have already taken place today and that are gaining momentum I think in two years time we'll see the back end of the field which I view as the organizations the institutions the community the interest groups that are already deeply embedded within the space and want to promote the space I think in two years time we'll see the back end becoming much more intelligent on how we share knowledge on how we collaborate on how we as different organizations individuals institutions can really come together and promote the field better and in a more holistic and connected way I think in five years time what we'll see is the front end becoming much more intelligent I think we'll see students newcomers of the space early professionals who are interested in public interest technology having a much more defined and clear pathway into the field having much smarter community platforms that allow newcomers to share information and share knowledge and share experiences joining the space new networking opportunities from people at various different skill sets levels and kind of positions in their professional careers to discuss with them you know amongst themselves to interact amongst themselves I think what we'll see is that front end really becoming much more cohesive and much more intelligent that is currently obfuscated today but we see current initiatives and programs trying to turn to already solve this problem and then I think in ten years what we'll see is the field of public interest technology becoming much more ubiquitous across different disciplines across seven verticals and industries I don't think we'll have a distinctly separate field of public interest technology that is completely separate and that people think of as separate I think public interest technology methodologies ways we solve problems the diverse interdisciplinary problem solving all these facets of the current field today will become embedded necessarily to solve the types of problems that will be facing in ten years down the road across industries across verticals across disciplines such that the the community that is really focused on PIT will be this backbone unit that really helps and touches the lives in a variety of different ways