 Welcome. Hello, everyone. This is the professional development panel where we're going to be talking to some challenge grant winners from 2019. And the title of the panel is collaborating and learning as a pit educator. My name is Effie McLaughlin. I am an assistant university dean for research at the City University of New York. And my entry point into the pit UN movement conversation, which I'm going to ask all of our speakers, our panelists today, is mostly from a professional development, faculty development, sort of research development perspective. I'm really interested in faculty engaging with these ideas and also developing research projects around these ideas. So I hope we'll get a bit of a chance to talk more about that. And also, as David Gustin started us out with yesterday on a personal note, my greatest technological challenge, my grand challenge today was getting I live in New York City and I have three daughters who are in the New York City public school system who are all good at different and all have different, they all have different online and remote learning schedules and my biggest challenge today was getting them out of the house so I could have uninterrupted bandwidth time to conduct this panel in. So I know that some of our panelists today or some of the moderators today, you know, basically read out the bios from each one of the speakers but I'm actually really much more interested the way that I would like to start out. And I'm going to introduce each one of you in turn but I'm basically just going to say your name and your affiliation and what I'd really like you to say is, you know, say whatever you think is important about your professional experience that brought you to the pit UN meeting today. And also because probably not a lot of the attendees today, had an opportunity to view your poster session video so if you could give really just a very brief statement about what your project was. And I'm going to try to keep this short I already had a conversation about this but we're going to try to stick to the time as much as we can so please try to keep it at two minutes and I will if I have to break you in for time I guess I will So I'm going to start out with I'm just going to go in the order that they are on the in the program so I'm going to start out with Dr. Kenneth Fleischman, who is the associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin and he's also the founding chair of James UT Grand Challenge as you see behind his head. And his project was the 2020 conference on undergraduate informatics education and can if you could just say, as I said a little bit about yourself, what brought you to the pit UN movement and just say a very brief overview of what your project was. Awesome. Thank you, Effie. I should mention sorry the website information was out of date when the program was made so I've been promoted since to professor. Texas at Austin sorry, but yes I'm really delighted to get to be here with such esteemed colleagues from across the pit UN universities. So, in the School of Information. We focus on the intersection between people information and technology but we always put people first. Our high school as many other high schools do builds upon and extends a tradition of service to users that comes from our roots and continued efforts in the field of librarianship. But we now expand that to a broad range of information technologies, some of which are still contained within libraries archives and museums and some of which go far beyond. So part of that effort in the Austin School of Information, we're launching an undergraduate major in informatics. We have six concentrations cultural heritage informatics, health informatics, human centered data science, social informatics, social justice informatics and user experience design. So, when we learned about the exciting opportunities at pit UN and the range of different universities and colleges, all getting together around this common vision of ensuring that technology serves the public interest. It fit perfectly for our high school. It fit really well for me my background is truly interdisciplinary. So, I was an undergrad CS anthropology double major. And then I moved to the field of science and technology studies where I got my master's in PhD, and then I've been living in high schools ever since. So, we were able to organize by just barely because it was March 2 to 4. So just immediately before everything shut down informatics education 2020 in the city of Austin at the campus of the University of Texas Austin. So the collaborators on the project within the UT Austin School of Information Amelia Acker and Eric Meyer are Dean and also our pit UN representative designate and also from the University of Michigan School of Information because we were two, you know, top high schools within that have that same tradition of of librarianship but taking far beyond and you know. So that included Pat Garcia, Casey Pearson Kintaro Treyama from University of Michigan School of Information so able to bring together faculty members and students from 30 different universities. 20 of which are current pit UN members, 20 of which might be feature pit UN members and there were a lot of actually Eric a lot of questions because he's also chairing the membership committee about, you know how to get their provost or president to join pit UN so it spurred a lot of interest and and in general, and it created a lot of information exchange, and then most the last thing I'll say about it most specifically, it led to a project that we're doing for the this coming year, which is the pit UN social justice informatics faculty which is a collaboration with Houston Tillotson University, which is the oldest university in the city of Austin it's also HBCU, as well as with measure and capacity catalyst to social justice oriented nonprofits, and the city of Austin, as well as UT Austin School of Information, good systems UT grand challenge, and we're going to have faculty fellows from across Houston Tillotson and University of Texas at Austin, learning directly from and with our nonprofit and government partners about what it means to do public interest technology. Thanks. Great. Thank you. I'm now going to move on to Dr ma mood for who is the associate director of the consortium for science policy and outcomes based in Washington DC and he's also a clinical associate professor for the school for the future of innovation in society. At part of Arizona State University, and his project was public interest technology community innovation fellowship. Hello. Thank you for the introduction that's safe and from telling who I am. I, my work mainly focuses on two questions. One question is, how do we make science more useful. And the other one is how do we make science and technology more democratic so it's just, it's the democratic part that brings me to pit UN. And it's a pleasure to give a brief overview of the public interest technology community innovation fellowship program that we launched with the help of our grant. The fellowship program is a partnership between as you led expert and citizen assessment of science and technology or ecast network, and the association for science and technology centers or aspects. So he cast is a network of university science centers and non partisan think tanks that engages public on science and technology decision making as tech is a membership based network of about 700 science and technology centers and museums. So our program focused on the public part of public interest technology, and on boundary organizations that work to engage them in science and technology society issues. Why, because there is a growing demand placed on these institutions to be the educators translators conveners facilitators and bridge builders between the lay public and decision makers on complex socio technical issues from artificial intelligence to gene editing to climate change. So our the project's goal was to create a replicable scalable and competitive fellowship program where museum professionals could work collaboratively with the civic government or university partner to co create and convene a public forum on a pit issues of interest to So we selected and trained 10 fellows in five communities so in Ann Arbor, Jade Mark said the museum of natural history work with Justin shell of Shapiro design to create a community forum on environmental justice in San Jose. I'm going to show us of tech interactive and Korean to Kara work together to create a forum on act tech biotech and food in Worcester, Rachel could be of a cotterium and Stephanie from the city of Worcester, created a forum on reducing urban heat island effect, and in Mexico, Texas Cindy Millard and Mayburn from the labor museum and Melissa Mullins created a forum on water challenges and climate resilience finally at LA Sasha worries of Discovery Cube and Rebecca Fredman from LA County Chiefs sustainability education. Now because of COVID-19 restrictions. Our fellows had to innovate and find online tools platform combined with creative strategies to engage stakeholders and residents in their respective communities, but they all persevered and looking at what they have built in the face of widespread uncertainties we couldn't be any more proud of them. And we are thrilled with the outcomes. Thank you. Great. Thank you my mood. Next up is Margaret Hagan, who is the executive director of the legal design lab and a lecture in law at Stanford Institute of Design, and her project was pit case studies platform. Yes, thanks. So, I came to the pit un movement as a lawyer and as a social scientist. I run a lab at the law school at Stanford where we work with legal aid groups and courts and city government to work on eviction cases or debt collection cases family law problems. And we've always been thinking. To improve the citizens experience of the justice system and how to leverage technology and data and artificial intelligence to improve the services and people's outcomes when they go through court. So public interest is already a watchword inside the law school community so it's been really great in terms of developing more interest in law schools faculty and students about how to work more interdisciplinary across campus to leverage all of these fields on problems and policy areas that we as lawyers and people in the justice system care about the project that I've been working on within the pit UN network has been a website, a case study platform in partnership with Georgetown University and to Nina Roth staying there at the Georgetown Law Center and Howard University and know how easy who's an electric electrical engineering professor. We have student teams and all of our universities who have been scouting around within our university network and beyond to find classes that are being taught on public interest tech themes or projects, and then to student projects that have emerged out of them, and we've been drafting case studies and publishing them on the platform you can go visit our prototype site pit cases.org. Our goal here is to really spotlight. The public interest technology project can best be launched within a class and potentially outside of it spinning out into a new venture and how teachers who are thinking about taking kind of a public interest technology lens or teaching a project based class can put together an effective syllabus build partnerships with community organizations and teach and guide students through this process. I've taught several public interest technology style classes and there's a lot of ups and downs and actually setting up the partnerships in the curriculum. So our goal is that these case studies can both be used inside of classes. So students can wrap their heads around this type of project work and in the planning stages for teachers as they're setting up a successful class. So you can see we have about six current case studies up there and we're putting more up week to week. If you have any interest in having any of your classes or projects profiled there please. There's a link on the website to let us know but we're really hungry for more examples from teachers and from student groups. Excellent. Yeah I have a colleague actually that goes to CUNY law and I told her when I learned about your website I was very excited and I told her because I know she's interested in public interest. So last but not least is Susan Emberman who is a professor of computer science at the College of Staten Island CUNY and actually formerly she was the associate dean for technology education at Central Office which is actually how I first met her. And she, her project that she did with our OER librarian and Fiddler is entitled curricula design and public interest tech. Please Susan. Thanks Abby. So my project was not just done with our OER librarian it was also done with a number of colleagues at the University. Karen Shelby at Brook University she's an artist. Deborah Sturm at College Staten Island who's a computer scientist and Dora Klattnick who's also a computer scientist at Brooklyn College. So we started off with a small village and the premise of our project is that it takes a village to create and share curriculum. So our project was to create a repository of materials that was focused on public interest tech by awarding university wide faculty mini grants to create and share pick curricula as an open educational resource. And we were essentially crowdsourcing across the CUNY university system. The resources and curriculum that we created were shared through our university repository and via pick group on OER Commons. So we created this pick group on OER Commons it is open to the public. You're more than welcome to link your materials to it. And both of these repositories made the curricula available for download to anyone who wishes to download it. We've had at the current time we have about 33 pieces of curriculum up there. I did my original video we had 18 so just to show you that we are constantly adding material to that. And since the summer so far we've had 507 downloads worldwide so it's been a very interesting project and very widespread. Great. Thank you so much Susan. So we're doing very well so I have to say I was when I viewed all of your your videos your poster sessions that you did when you spoke about your projects. One of the things that struck me and maybe this is just my own inclination sort of in my background as a political theorist I'm really interested in an additional aspect like we're still I think struggling a little bit with what is public interest tech and how what people what people's understanding of public interest tech is. And interestingly I don't know how many of you attended the the president's provost meeting today but Amory Slaughter was saying you know what's wonderful there seems to be there does seem to be this this common idea of what come public interest tech is is gelling and there's the courses being led and we're you know creating a program or a discipline or not a program but a discipline. And the thing that really struck me about these four different projects sort of how they differed was that Kenneth and Susan's projects although Kenneth you said you have a very interdisciplinary background was that in some ways they were much more sort of grounded in the art traditional sense of like as you know as mentioned one of the other panel sort of the the digital understanding of public of technology, whereas my mood and it really seemed like they were had much sort of a broader understanding of technology that you bought your projects and the people that were engaging with with your projects, and particularly my moods I mean it's interesting with you working with the museums and the science educators I mean this is I guess what NSF calls sort of STEM learning and informal settings and so I guess what my question is having said all of that I guess I'm just wondering of the the the faculty members and the the science educators and the students that you worked with. Did you get a sense of, I mean did you sort of leave the definition of what is public interest technology up to them and let them figure it out through their work, or did you have sort of a common understanding of. You know, because I mean it's again sort of my mood it seemed like there was a very broad I mean the projects that you covered dealt with, you know smarter cities to you know what are usage to I guess I'm, I'm wondering sort of how you're defining technology. Maybe we can start with you Mahmood. Yeah, so our actually goal was to find the public interest and I think that's what Larry Susskind was talking about in the previous panel, which is, you know, so we actually let the communities, our partners to figure that out by asking the people. So they did an extensive the first phase was you know the topic development. So they engage with the stakeholders and experts in their communities to say if it's water okay that's what I want but what's the issuing water I want to particularly focus on. And then they developed the program a set of questions, and then they brought in the public for the dialogue so that's how it was, you know to find what's the public interest. So normally because we're coming at this from that recognizing there's a public value failure when we fail to incorporate the public. And what is that and we think that the best people to answer that questions the public themselves. So, so, instead of, you know, as academics trying to figure it out by studying the review and and doing all the things we do. This was an exploratory in that sense, is that kind of address. Yeah, absolutely so Margaret do you have any thoughts and sort of what was that the technology that you're bringing to the public interest technology. Well, I think because our project focus so explicitly on kind of courses and projects student projects that were already out there. We were interrogating like what classes actually identify in this public interest text fear and I would say the general pattern that we see in terms of courses are a public interest partner, meaning either a government agency or a nonprofit who is acting with a mission from the public interest, then coming to a university class partner and saying how do we fix this problem how do we kind of solve this gap, usually with the idea that technology is the solution. So as we saw more case studies come in. Yes, oftentimes the projects that come out of these public interest tech classes are data driven or artificial intelligence or new text messaging system, but not always. Sorry, I have a kindergarten or interrupting me can I take a break. Oh, of course. So can what do you. So, um, what sort of projects and discussions came out of the conference that you had in terms of sort of I guess, you know, converging on a definition for public interest tech. Okay, so I mean very broad reaching so we largely left it up to the participants in terms of, we laid out public interest technology as we understood it from the new America website and from our involvement in the first convening. I think that we're still building the whole concept of public interest technology and fit UN is, is, you know, in this really exciting growth phase. So there's a lot of opportunity and opening there for us in a school of information. We're an inherently interdisciplinary unit. So, we're not a discipline we're a wide range I believe we're we're rapidly expanding and the Towson school of information with the launch of the undergraduate major so this number of a dramatically different in a few years. But last time we looked at this a few years ago we had about low 20s faculty and we had at least 10 different PhD fields across the faculty. So we won't typically find that in a CS department or an engineering department or in a core social science or humanities department. So, I mean there were, you know, I would say a third of the people who attended were at UN universities who were learning about informatics and iSchools about a third were from informatics and iSchools learning about pit UN, and a third were kind of wildcards. We had quite a mixture and when I heard the original idea of pit UN and of public interest technology it sort of struck me immediately as how much it resonated with what we're already doing in schools information. So, in some ways, I almost my reaction is part of the reason we need public interest technologies because not every university has a school of information. I'm not sure, I mean, I think that definitely there is value in each of the different concepts but there's a lot of convergence, and it would be great to see the public interest technology university network and the iSchools coordinate in terms of thinking about how the brand of using technology to serve people to do user centered technology, leverage data information technology to serve the public interest and to, you know, not, you know, when you just say well here's some problem we'll add technology to solve it. In a lot of cases, it's going to exacerbate existing inequalities in society in some cases it's even going to create new inequalities in society, and our approach is quite the opposite we want to figure out ways that we can use information technology that is people centered that social justice oriented to make people feel that we have a more just and where we have we have equity and justice and liberation of society. Right. So Susan I noticed when I was looking at your project I noticed that you had, I mean you funded the faculty projects that you funded were all the way from you know creating a module into from an existing course, all the way to creating a whole new course and also working. And so my response was for faculty working across disciplines you know humanities and social science and STEM disciplines. How did, what did you find in terms of how the faculty across the different disciplines approach the idea, you know, approach the concept of public interest tech. Basically we did not define public interest tech per se. What we did was we offered the various definitions that life from the court site and from new America and from the Heinz School also had a lot of good information exactly how you can frame it. But the bottom line was we told everybody it's a nation field there is no real definition, and we are the ones who are defining as we go along. And that's why we felt that in OER was a good way to go because as defining this nation field of pit, we're going to take whatever curriculum and resources that we've already built, and build upon them and share what we've done to, you know, extend what has been done already. And I think that's where that there the power is is that we were still in the weeds right now we're still trying to figure out exactly what it is. And we did a training and I kind of welded down to two phrases, we do good, and we do no harm. And around those two ideas, we can expand upon the idea of what it is. Great, thank you. So I want to encourage everyone. If for all the participants in this session you'll please if you have any questions, share them in the chat, you can put your questions in the chat as we go along and we hope to leave a good amount of time at the end to get to any of your questions and we have very able technical support people to make sure that we don't lose anything. So, I guess, one of my other questions is about. I know that many of you talked about sort of outcomes in your in your videos but I'm wondering. You are very sort of explicit in terms of the outcomes that you're measuring but I guess, even in a more general sense. How do you. How are you measuring the outcomes how you measuring the success of these and then I guess also to the extent that if you you see, you know what's the next step where do you are you thinking about scaling up you thinking about transferring to other contexts other schools, other populations in terms of outreach outside of the Academy which many of you are already doing. So, why don't I start with you can this time so what do you think about in terms of next steps for this project. Yes, thank you every so yes and this I mean the collaboration that we have with between UT Austin school of information, Houston Tiltson University measure capacity catalyst in the city of Austin emerged organically from the conference. feedback overall was extremely positive about the conference I think a lot of people had a great experience learned a lot met a lot of great folks did some good networking saw some educational approaches that was part of in you know in launching our informatics major that will start accepting students in fall 2021. We wanted to make sure that our faculty were interacting with folks who had vast experience teaching undergraduate students specifically teaching undergraduate students in terms of how to leverage data information and technology to serve the public interest which is a huge for our high school and for the informatics major. So that that naturally led from workshops that that we had at the conference that combine different stakeholders across the city of Austin just seem like in the coven moment a really exciting opportunity to focus on how we could turn the city of Austin into a model of how multiple universities multiple nonprofits and city government could collaborate together academics alone can't solve all the world's problems. And I think this is similar to my moods approach that we, you know, we didn't come in saying we know everything. Definitely, there's a whole lot that academics can learn from our community partners and from government agencies that have a much richer sense of what actually can be done and needs to be done in the world, and we're much more powerful together than we would be in isolation. Great, thank you. So Margaret what about it for you in terms of just I know you want to get more cases for the website but what what do you see sort of more sort of long term would be the beneficial outcome from your project. Well I think as the network as this pit you and network really solidifies and grows. Our goal is that the case studies and the resources can be integrated into it. I think. The members of the network are also quite interested in having this rich set of content and resources guides examples. There as a central resource. So we're talking with the leadership about how we might fold in all of the materials that we've been assembling into their kind of central website, and also how we set up a pretty user friendly protocol to capture all of this research that comes out of disparate classes, programming events, because we know it's really hard oftentimes in some universities to get a new pit oriented project off the ground or to help a teacher who's taught in a certain way to all of a sudden teach a type of class and start community partnerships, grade and evaluate these kind of projects, or even know how to support students during the class or afterwards. So our hope is that, as we build more examples and more content, we can have very well structured guidance for these future teachers and future students in this space. So, Susan, what do you see in terms of I know that I mean I also have. I'm a huge advocate of the OER work as well and as you know I've done a lot of work with the library in terms of building out the open educational resources initiatives at CUNY but I'm, I'm wondering sort of how do you see where do you see going forward in terms of building out your OER website, I mean and I guess also maybe the, I don't know like future intersections or the ongoing conversation between OER and pit, sort of where do you see that headed. So, well, going forward, I'm hoping to get more people to contribute to that pit website at OER Commons. It would be great to link some case studies up there also. Great. Plus one there. And, and also, in the process of getting all these faculty together to do their grants, we had trainings together, we actually formed a kind of community was kind of a very holistic type of experience. So that the faculty members themselves were looking and talking to each other and seeing that there was some synergistic, you know, relationships that they could leverage. And so I think that in addition to that faculty have said to me do you know I did this but I want to go on and extend what I've done. And like, so there are people who created a module for a course and I wanted to revamp an entire course, or they saw that there was some interdisciplinary action that they can take within their institutions so that they can have some type of maybe type of disciplinary minor created so there's a lot of avenues that we can go along in order to extend and expand. Thank you. So my mood, I'm wondering, I mean, as I said, you actually had very good outcomes data in your presentation if anyone gets a chance to watch it but I guess I'm what I'm sort of curious. So I don't know if you were able to sit in on the, the presidents and Provost panel today when Eric Schmidt and Darren Walker from the Ford Foundation and formerly from Google spoke, but they all spoke very strongly about the importance of you, you know universities and universities as the platform for driving innovation and driving, you know, making real societal change. And I guess I'm wondering from your perspective with somebody that works, much more closely or works much more with the, you know, these community groups and these sort of public, you know, science literacy groups and museum groups and public science groups. I guess I'm wondering what, what do you see is like the, the feedback loop or the synchronicity between what universities are doing and what these these public science organizations are doing and how can they support each other. Well, you know, one of the, when we, you know, when our grant was reviewed one of the things question that was asked of us is how are you going to work with the other network universities, you know, because you are going to work with the museums and the communities. And, and we, we did try to open it up to engage with the other universities. But one of the challenges that we found was more like cultural, because this idea of, you know, directly engaging with the public is, is, is, is most universities are educators of come at this from a deficit sense, like if they need to know some information and if they know that information, they're going to do what we are recommending them to do. So it, it, so there is kind of a, I feel like, although we work the part with the working with the museums and community organizations work very well. But I think we need to do some cultural or educational exposure about what is it to actually work with the community, what is it to actually listen and not go there to say, Oh, you need to know this and I have an answer, because that this co development process so I think that, you know, the demand side of it is there, the supply side from the university we need to do some work on to sort of train faculty train postdocs, you know, in kind of how do you kind of do this bridge building engagement that would be as something that I would think would be important to do. Oh, sorry, right. So I guess interesting I was at a governance subcommittee. It, I mean, I guess some of these meetings that we are a bit in or panels and committees they sort of address the coven 19 thing that the quarantine thing head on and then other times it seems like we sort of dance around that and it's like, Oh, look, we're in this virtual conference and everything is fine and he we all just talking to each other just like normal. But I guess I am interested. I mean, I mean, I guess in some respects I can sort of see the very direct importance and impact of say, Oh, you are because that directly, you know impacts how we teach and our pedagogy and but I guess I would like to hear from each of you one how your project itself adapted to our greatly changed circumstances, and also, again, sort of the future question in terms of I don't know responding to this and learning from it like what are you going to learn from this experience going forward in terms of how you continue to think about pit and continue to think about these projects. I'm going to start with you might Margaret because you're shaking your head. I would say in the short term, you know our project is still of case studies is going full steam ahead we didn't necessarily need that much in person to get it done though everything has slowed down in terms of responsiveness and people schedules. That's a real thing. The coven related delays. I would say though at the bigger question if our project is really motivated on how do we teach public interest technology and give students really good methodologies to do participatory design technology development ethical reviews all of these things. It's, we don't really have that many good models for doing much of this work that depends on hands on collaborative in person trainings in a more virtual world. So we're really interested if anyone out there has models I know in my classes we've been trying out virtual design workshops virtual user interviews all of these kind of new methodologies. Where before we were really reliant on in person convenings and all of this good participatory interactive kind of reckoning with technologies consequences or advantages we're losing a lot of that in the digital sphere so now we're really hungry to do some of that initial continuation of how some of these coven versions of technology and project based classes are going and how we can start to define some best practices for those. Oh, if you're muted I think. Sorry, am I, you can hear me. Okay. You know that I'm very interested in no we are and how it's impacting our pedagogy and how we teach and how we, you know, approach education and learning and, and I'm wondering how you think I mean it seems like, you know, the coven 19 crisis has brought into high relief sort of the importance of the development of these materials and I just wondering how, if it all that you know, this period of thinking about this period is impacted how you think about your work in your project. So, so I'm going to relate this to to one other project that I've done an OER and the current project so one of the projects that we've done that sort of preceded the one that I'm doing for pit and sort of informed it was that we as part of CUNY's one of the unique initiatives that we have with the city is that we bring industry professionals into the classroom to give a industry focused class. And part of the requirements of these industry people these poor guys is that we require that they share whatever materials that they use in the classroom as we are in this way other people can see how industry is working. And according to my one of my colleagues that who was watching all the downloads, as soon as COVID hit, the number of downloads increased significantly, we're out there looking for materials in order to use in their online classes, especially PowerPoints and, and homework assignments and lab assignments and these, these were, you know, we were, we were hungry. And to that end, because everything, you know, especially CUNY, we had it like we flipped on a dime to online learning. Many of the faculty that were working on projects for me became their workload increased exponentially. Yeah, it's hard to imagine that it does just by, you know, going online versus face to face but when you're online, it tends the content teams to go faster and therefore you have to prepare more content and it's definitely just a and the way that you assign homework and do projects definitely changes. So a lot of our faculty were a bit overwhelmed. A couple of them, you know rescinded their awards they said they just didn't have any time I know. And then a lot of them just said, Well, we just need some more time we just want to hit the summer, and just be able to focus on this without having to worry about the classes and work who is very gracious and allowed us to do an extension until December of this year so we're still not finished so. Yeah, so it definitely affected us in a lot of ways but it's definitely in terms of being useful for a community or an academic community at large that we are that we already have up there was certainly utilized by many, many people. And I know I mute myself I have a tendency to make noises entire time and people are talking, which is not it's not a good thing and zoom because you can't have two voices at the same time. So can so how had how did the COVID-19 crisis I know that you talked a little bit about how it felt like the, you know the pace of everything was speeded up and you had to have you had the conference right before sort of the whole shutdown but how do you see. The thinking about the COVID-19 crisis and the shutdown and all of that impacting the work that you do with your project. Yeah, I mean, to be honest, I think most of it was just dumb luck from the standpoint that we had scheduled that I mean the conference center had a very limited number of dates. We were given options in January, February, March and April. The April one was right before Kai and Hawaii, which didn't happen of course it got completely canceled. But that was the reason why we, we instead picked the March date. We didn't have a lot of time to be honest part of our original thinking of doing it in the, you know spring semester was avoiding the heat of, you know, Texas in the summer. And then, you know, there became a very different reason why it wasn't possible to hold a conference in the summer. So, and we had 20 fellowship winners who flew in courtesy of the generous funding from pit un that we're able to award, which was faculty or students or postdocs, and who were affiliated with minorities, many of whom were affiliated with minority serving institutions, or were members of groups who were underrepresented in in pit. So it's great to be able to have a broad representation of participation across the conference. So, I mean, it was actually made it more memorable for many of us because it became the last in person conference that many of us will attend for a bit, certainly have to this point and we didn't have to figure out how to do a virtual conference, which I can appreciate as a major challenge, even pulling off an in person conference with just a few months lead time was was challenging enough. But it. Yeah, again, it made us in terms of our next steps made us think. I think the covert moment makes you think about what's most important, and what kind of collaborations are most essential in this moment. And I think that really did for us sort of lead to this idea let's build a citywide collaboration and, you know, start something here in Austin, Texas, and then expand it out to the country in the world. Well, we're, we're at the point where we're almost to take questions from the audience but my mood I do want to hear from you I'm particularly interested to I guess, working with a lot of these cultural and public institutions I mean that with your partner as tech your partner I mean it seems like, hasn't there been a huge crisis in terms of funding and I mean I'm just wondering what's how the coven crisis has impacted even. I don't know the existence of some of these institutions that are your primary partners, do you have any thoughts about that I mean just in addition to thinking about how coven is impacted your project. No that that's that's exactly right because it wasn't existential crisis so, and our, our program was spread out the whole year, you know so we just finished our training and now we're going to train them how to build a forum. So we built them in summer and that just, you know, obviously was not possible. And, and some of, and all the museums shut down. Some of them were, some of the people were furloughed, luckily, you know, one, but all of our fellows made the survive the first wave, some of them didn't the more than once. So, but what happened was that one day wanted to keep on going. They said we want to so we actually kept our training schedule, the webinars. We just pushed out the actual forum convening part to the fall. What also happened, which is what I think was, you know, Ken talked about miracle or something like that. So, what's the transformation that happened. They became the innovators up with a very different unique design. And some of them I will encourage you to go and visit what they created. This, this was quite remarkable using synchronous asynchronous, you know, and hybrid kind of environment. So it pushed them to actually do something more than what we originally planned for. And I feel like we have stress tested this program. So I think, you know, if things become more normal, because our, our fallback position is face to face is very important. When you sit down with a person you share a meal, you hang out together that's very different than what you can do in online. But, you know, if we can go back to that and use some of the learning, we can make a more enhanced engaging opportunity for citizens and decision makers to come together and deliver it. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks. So I do not say I have a question sheet and mark is there other questions that are coming in from the audience that we can respond to because we're in the question answer period. Oh, there's no question so far. You've answered all of their questions. I guess the one I mean sort of the one question that I did have for both of you I mean we were going to do we're going to do a little bit of a wrap up in a few minutes, but I guess I would be interested to find out for those of you that did more sort of like the mini grant type or you know conference and mini grant type things what were the criteria that you use to select your the people that participated in your project so Susan what in terms of picking the faculty in the project how did you how did you choose who is going to get the grants and do this. Well, we looked at whether the proposals connected pit with a discipline that they were actually in. And in our RFP we also requested that the faculty give us a timeline for when they're going to implement the curriculum was not just enough that they're going to give us a curriculum as in terms of a resource, but we wanted them to implement in the classroom. And they were also required to give us a budget as to how they're going to use the funds that we gave them. And we made our decisions based on whether these three criteria made sense in terms of the proposal. We also tried to make sure that we funded proposals that covered a representative cohort with respect to full time faculty versus adjunct faculty community college and senior colleges, as well as looking for a geographic diversity within New York City. And can I know you talked about I was a little bit so that the conference itself you said there were 100 participants from 30 colleges but then there were 10 specific awardees so who were the 10 and I know that you said that you tried to be, you know, selected diverse group but I'm curious I wasn't entirely clear on who the actual actual cohort of the 10 grant sort of mini grant recipients were. Yes, I believe it was 20, although there may have been one or two to cancel due to. But it was either 18 or 19 of the 20 awarded we're still able to make it despite the unusual pandemic pre, you know, just on the cusp of the pandemic circumstances. And so the three criteria that will okay so first, we participants submitted abstracts for it could be a paper or a panel or a poster. And so we reviewed those first. We were looking for relevance to public interest technology. We were looking for relevance to the field of informatics broadly conceived which again at us at the u t Austin School of Information our approach to to informatics is very broad and interdisciplinary so we had a lot of social scientists there we had a lot of computer scientists there as well as folks in high schools and other units of biologists and engineers and and lawyers so wide range of different folks. And certainly representation was one of the considerations so our view of excellence is that it has to include broad representation as part of that. You're never going to get the best ideas by looking at a very narrow cross section of of of participants and you want to have everyone's ideas at the table you'll have much richer ideas as a result. And then once we had done that pass then we reviewed we also had the only some people applied for the travel fellowship so many but you know if someone was a full professor we had a director of a school come. And so they're able to pay their own way through their their travel funds. So we prioritize to folks who wouldn't have travel funds or wouldn't have sufficient travel funds. So the three criteria that we use were prioritizing junior over senior. So we're focusing on students we had undergraduate masters and doctoral students present and presenting with some fabulous undergraduates from Olin College of Engineering who presented the conference which was phenomenal. It was a conference on undergraduate education so it was great to have undergrads who are the actual consumers of the of the product there to tell us what we could be doing better and also perhaps thinking about their careers as potential future educators. And we had postdocs and some junior faculty, and then we focused on minority serving institutions. So we had participants from for HSI and from to HBC use. I think that was, you know, certainly funding is useful in the context that I mean whether you're talking about a minority serving institution or community college that I mean, every institution has different resources, unfortunately so it's important that we make sure that we broad representation, even though not every institution has the same opportunities and resources that's the benefit of the that you and funding. We also want to make sure we had broad representation in terms of lived experience. In terms of, we asked people to describe the extent to which they felt represented in in in pit in stem in informatics and so certainly, you know, one aspect of that is like gender gender identity, sexual orientation, race or ethnicity, disability status, first generation college student, you know a lot of different factors veteran status that could play into that but we wanted to have broad representation across our society. And we really felt that I mean that that did help to really have a breadth of representation and perspectives which led to much deeper conversations if everyone had been from the same universities and you know address the same and everything it wouldn't have been an interesting event. It was much more much richer from the different lived experiences the different disciplinary perspectives, the different institution types which really drives what undergraduate education is like at a liberal arts school compared to a polytechnic, compared to an Ivy League school so we had this broad representation. Yeah. Yeah, I saw cute. I just want to add that I attended that conference and it was great. Yeah, and it was plus one for that kind of it was, it was, and it was just before the, you know, basically everything hit the fan, and like the next week we're like, Oh my god. And it was the last income in person conference I attended. And just about five minutes left and they had asked us to give you a little time to just wrap up say any parting comments anything you'd like to say about the conference about your project about you and about where we're going where you've been anything. Why don't we start with you Margaret. Sure, well I think you know I had come to this project. I thought I was very interdisciplinary before I kind of started the case study project. But really it turns out I had been in my bubble of other law school professors or lab directors and had been thinking of public interest and kind of very narrow justice or law oriented way of thinking and way of teaching my classes. So I really appreciated seeing how public interest tech classes are being taught in public health schools in policy schools and all kinds of other domains and so I'd really recommend that if you are teaching a class. There's a lot to learn from other folks is syllabi and coursework how they structure their partnerships and classes. So, I'm all for more of this kind of cross sharing and figuring out, even if we are all interested in public interest tech the unique variations that that actually takes in different policy domains. So yeah, I'm really interested to see how we develop more of great teaching methods and how we can share them really effectively with each other. I think that's a great place for my mood to come in here too because it's not only sort of radically interdisciplinary and getting out of your own bubble but it's also those really important connections between, you know, non governmental organizations and you know in the public and Mamu, do you have any final thoughts about you'd like to share. Yeah, I think that you know what it convinced us first of all the model works you know we brought in somebody from museum world and brought to work with somebody from say government or nonprofit or university, and they can co create something and build that relationship work five out of five times, you know, so they, and, and what we also saw that there's actually a great demand for this, and we need to create the capacity, you know if you look at post election or in our COVID recovery and so forth. So we need to figure out how to empower these institutions which are kind of at the frontline. So universities, you know to pick you and we can actually be help build those capacity and now that we have created a model. So if all of us have different models, we can actually then you know replicate this and build a social capacity in different levels so that will be, you know, the long term goal here. Yeah, it's exciting. Susan, what do you think. Well, I always like to quote Katie Kamisky who's the grantees and is the other session. So basically, OER is it buys very nature, it is a public interest technology. She's also said by the way, if you own a cell phone you're a technologist. Well, we can argue on that one but okay. I think, you know, I think it's just what it's OER is defined by pit it is a public interest technology and it's one that we can utilize in our academic curriculum in our syllabi and share and I and I'm just really excited to see the way that people use our curriculum that you've provided in addition to case studies and how these are revised and reworked into even bigger and better educational courses and curricula going forward. Great. So you've got the last word can So I think for us, it was really exciting. I mean, part of the strength of Pitt UN as we see it is the broad range of colleges and and universities and schools that represented at Pitt UN. It's a broad representation of different institution types at most like in I schools most I schools tend to be in large public universities which are great, but aren't the whole of academia so the broad range of different, different academic institutions that was represented and it's led to so many collaborations. So we're already thinking about what UT Austin and Houston Toten can do together to collaborate. There's an interlocal agreement between the city of Austin and UT Austin that resulted in part from the collaborations that good systems UT Grand Challenge and the UT Austin I school have been involved in and bringing in we're funding seven projects with the city of Austin and good systems UT Grand Challenge one of which won the Metro lab innovation of the month award for July 2020. So there are a lot of opportunities for doing smart city work where it's not just about the tech. It's about how the tech can serve the public interest. Thank you so much, all of you. I. So are we mark is there something that we need to do to close this out or are we good. What do we do. Well, thanks again so much, all of you. And I think there's a few more events I hope to attend the final celebration event but I hope to see you all again soon and it's been a real pleasure hearing about your work. Thanks so much. See you soon. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.