 Hi, all my name is Andrewine Soli. I manage the public interest technology university network pit UN for short. So it's a helpful tip right there. Welcome to our conversation about engaging your institutions in the 2020 pit university network challenge year two We launched the challenge officially on March on Monday, April 13th. So hopefully you have all received a copy of the application from Your designees. I also made sure that it went out to some of your research offices from year one. So you should have copies of the The RFP and a sample of the application as well. I've invited our four panelists to talk about their experiences running the network challenge in your one We hope to offer some helpful tips and tools for this year's challenge to both new members to the network. So welcome to the new members. I know who are on the chat. As well as some of the old members from year one our charter members. I'm hoping that we'll all learn how to improve the challenge process moving forward. I'm going to ask each person to introduce themselves as they offer an overview of their approach to the challenge after each Individuals have had a chance to talk, we will open the floor for questions. So let's take it away Dave from ASU. Hi everybody. Good morning from the desert. It's probably not morning where you guys are I hope everybody is is staying safe and healthy. As Andrean said, my name is Dave Guston. I'm at Arizona State University where I direct the school for the future of innovation and society. And one of the benefits that we've had in pursuing the challenge awards is that as I as designee at ASU also have the platform of the school and academic unit That is significantly dedicated to public interest technology responsible innovation science technology and innovation studies and cognate concepts as a platform to be able to both operate and promote The pit you and challenge across the university. Andrean had handed us a set of questions and for want of a stronger narrative. I think I'll work my way through at least the most relevant kinds of questions to what we did in year one and what we're changing and tweaking to do in in year two. And one of the I think most important things is in trying to reach beyond the networks that one normally operates in within one's college or university to get the the full Participation in the campus that might be available. And so the first thing that we did at ASU was that we actually created a website called pit at ASU the URL is P I T dot ASU dot EDU that attempts to catalog just about everything that we're doing at ASU in the pit space generally. And that provided a point of reference for a lot of people who were Potentially in the space but perhaps unfamiliar with the idea that this was being promoted as relabeled as or people weren't being invited to this pit space. We extended invitations through the provost office and what is then the provost has direct contact with basically all the deans in the university and a regular meeting and as school head. I'm part of that Group. So we were able to reach out to all the deans to notify them both of that website tool as well as with the university. Network challenge when it first came down that was both a necessary thing but an insufficient thing we found out because quite frankly At a large research university like ASU all the information that comes across the desk of dean level participants We did not see that information move down from the deans very effectively and very efficiently. It was perhaps not a huge amount of money or large numbers of Grants to get them to seriously pay attention among the whole host of emails that they needed to pay attention to. So instead what we're doing this year is we're working more intensively. Through a contact group that the university has of associate deans for research. This is facilitated by the associate dean for research that I have on in my school who as luck would have it is also the university's chair of the committee for what we call limited submissions. And this is another interesting aspect of this because As you all probably know the call for proposal suggests that there are limited number of submissions that each college or university can provide. And so you may need to organize an internal competition on the one hand you need to publicize it across the university on the other hand you need to Force that publicity into a narrow funnel and possibly a competition among folks who are interested For us that was a bit of a challenge because like I said the school that I direct is substantially interested and focused on these things. And we could take the opportunity to do real infrastructure development within the caught within the school but we have to sort of be honest brokers as well. In the first year of competition. We set up an internal research and advancement and development function as a school we have that function already in existence but we put special effort into the pit proposals again because this was a sort of signature idea for the work that we do in the school. And we encouraged anyone and everyone to come forward with ideas we had a face to face meeting where our research advancement team put together a template or rubric that was not necessarily based on the evaluation rubric that the pit you and challenges provided but incorporated elements of it and so we had a consistent framework. That everybody could enter the conversation within something like if you're familiar with with DARPA or something like the hallmark. Catechism where you basically ask a set of coherent questions about the research question that you're interested in and try to answer those as a way of clarifying your own thinking about what exactly you are doing in the research. And so we took all the ideas that we had in the school we were not aware at that time of any ideas that were sparkling up elsewhere. And we developed them both through interactions with staff and interactions with other faculty members. We did not do a full what might be called red teaming of pre proposals because quite frankly we didn't have the the resources and the expected value was not going to be high enough for us to organize full teams to assess each of the proposals going forward but we did have voluntary interactions where the PI would choose to participate and another volunteer senior investigator would sit down with that PI and and work on particular things. Usually we asked for the a full draft proposal before we engaged in that interaction. The the limited submissions competition at the university was set up to include not the full draft proposal but elements of it that incorporated what seemed to be key elements of the template evaluation scheme that the pit you and network had provided. And so because of the time required both to do the internal evaluation the time required to revise a proposal that that was submitted and that was approved by the university. We didn't do a full. We didn't ask for the full proposal but then we provided feedback on the partial one. I'm probably close to the time that I've got at the moment. The lessons that we learned to hope to inform this process was that we really needed to get full campus participation, both the top down and a bottom up and a mid level we needed to sort of hit all all parts of the communication network in order to get as robust campus engagement as we possibly could. Thanks. Dan. Hi, thanks, Andrew. I'm Dan McCluskey from college Staten Island and City University of New York. And so last year when we were approached by Pitt UN to become a member and to participate in the challenge grant we were I was serving as interim associate vice chancellor for research and so the massive system is the third largest university system in country with about 500,000 undergraduate students and 8,000 full time faculty spread across 25 different campuses from community college four year and professional and graduate schools. And so a lot of what I'm going to talk about resonates with what Dave was talking about in terms of ASU's approach. So with a big university system, it's important to have a limited submission process and so CUNY has a limited submission process that sounds a lot like ASU's where opportunities are communicated through deans and provosts at the individual campuses and those deans and provosts sort of nominate faculty from within their campus to participate in specific funding opportunities and so this because of the limited opportunity for all of CUNY we triggered the limited submission protocol for this. Stepping back though as we saw that we were going to be part of the Pitt UN network we were thinking about ways that we can energize a community around the themes of public interest technology. And so dating back to I think January or February of 2019 we put together a conference a one day conference attended by about 200 faculty from across CUNY on the theme of social justice and emerging technology so thinking about how new technology can be good and bad along themes of social justice and we thought that this was a nice way to dovetail with the Pitt UN mission and so what we did was we invited I think 12 organizers from across the university to participate some of them technology based on from the law school some from social justice initiatives and we had a really good you know organizational process where they put together a really great conference. At the conference we actually invited Afua Bruce from New America to come and give a little bit of presentation on on the Pitt UN and also to talk about the challenge grant and what people can expect and so we saw this as an opportunity to really energize a bunch of people around this idea. I think what Dave was saying was absolutely correct. We've always struggled with the idea of reaching out to provost and deans and having them communicate things and you know they get a lot of emails and have a lot of things to communicate so finding opportunities to reach out directly to faculty was sort of always a priority for us and we thought that our target group was the group of people who attended or at least expressed interest in our social justice and emerging technology conference which we had last April. So after the conference we basically sent out the RFP which I think Andrew had provided a copy of RFP that went out to faculty in an email and we leveraged the 12 or so organizers of our conference to serve as grant review panel. So we started the limited submission process and our conference organizers were the panelists that would review the proposals that came in. I think we had somewhere around 20 proposals that we reviewed and the rubric that we used for judging the grants I think was also included in the email from Andrew. And so this work there are some lessons learned so ultimately we were able to narrow down from our 20 grants to about four grants we were looking for a balanced portfolio looking across different types of institutions. We also reserved the largest bucket of funding for university wide initiatives. So that that money was a really great proposal looking at providing mini grants and so one of the lessons learned was that this is a viable option for us that we don't need to have all of the dollars spent up front as long as we had a clear idea and clear goals about how the money would be spent and what the expectations were in the impact that we were looking for. Number of new courses to be offered. And so the mini grants are basically offered to faculty for release time or course buyout time so that they can use it. Another really great proposal that was funded was at the college of Staten Island and Staten Island has a new campus. And really building the campus theme around social justice and emerging technology along the UN theme and really integrating technology skilled students with with students in the public interest working in fields of public interest. And that's been a real success too. So those are two examples of proposals. What we wound up doing was sort of reconfiguring some things across the 20 proposals so at the end of the day we probably had fewer than 20 that we worked with because we found. Opportunities where we could streamline and get multiple groups working together. And we saw some energy that developed out of that that some of these initiatives we think started anyway even without the funding and so that was that was a real benefit we think and so you know this year obviously things are a little bit different. It's hard to organize a 200 person conference in a in a in a small space these days but organizing conferences might be in some ways easier you don't have to worry about catering or or hotels or airfare for people and so there is something that I feel like worked well that we were able to tap into the community that we wanted to by having sort of this open discussion about about public interest technology and what it could be and what it what it is. And so I think that that was a real success for us and in terms of trying to get the right community involved because we have always struggled with getting administrators to help us pass along information to faculty. Other offices besides the Office of Research at CUNY that were involved with the element technology in office and broadly across academic affairs. And so we really centered it around being part being a charter member of public interest technology university network and how that was a benefit to CUNY and then sort of built off the grant request based off of that. Thanks for that Dan. I hope I hope folks are going to be sort of curious about the mini grants process that'll be really something to dig into. Antonio. Thank you. So hi everyone. My name is Antonio Delgado. I'm the dean of engineering technology and design at Miami College. So let me first introduce the college Miami College is right now one of the largest colleges in the nation. We serve more than more than 100,000 students every year. So we are distributed across Miami. We have eight campuses. And as you can imagine, like it's not independent campus. We are all one one college. So every time that we have a grant opportunity, we go through the Office of Resource Development, which worked with all the campuses and all the leadership from each campus. And we made sure that all the opportunities are shared across the whole college. So in this case, with PIT, which by the way, we are a very proud member, probably one of the few colleges that are members right now. So in this case, we went through the same process. We shared the proposal through our Office of Resource Development. And usually what they do, they release an announcement about the proposal, what is it about the link to the RFP. And we create like an internal deadline for people to apply with the startup form. This is just a one page where everyone needs to submit like why, what, when, or how much is going to cost your proposal. And based on that based on that initial email that is sent to the whole college leadership plus 400 faculty or administrators that have expressed interest in grants in general. So is the message is shared and then people from the college can pretty much submit a proposal, a one page proposal to get assigned to a grant writer. So in this case, or last year when the first announcement was made, each unit individually could start getting together to really put together like strong proposals. And in my case, as representative of PIT in the college, I not only share with my technology faculty, which by default should be the ones that can already think about adding technology, but also all the partners that we have in the college working with nonprofit organizations and big organizations like Microsoft. For example, we reached out to them and we told them like we have this opportunity and we, we as a community college that we are we really believe on the support to the community. So that collaboration with nonprofits, government and local companies are really strengthen our proposal so that collaboration you know between our internal faculty with external partners and then the office of social impact that we also have in the college. Really put together. Last year we have at least eight proposals that were originally submitted for internal evaluation so regarding the evaluation process, the director of research development and the director of social impact met with me the three of us and we discussed based on the RFP what proposals really make sense and other proposals that were not particularly the best fit for this grant so we we diverted those proposals that were not a good fit into other opportunities that at the end some of them really transforming to awards from other places, but we were able to get down to four proposals last year and each proposal got assigned a grant writer. From those proposals we finally submitted three and two of them were awarded by by by PIT so we were really happy with the process and that's what we are we're sharing today, our approach last year and the lessons that we learn. We definitely saw the importance of collaboration, not only internally between multiple departments that when you think about the technology faculty are thinking about the knowledge, but not always about the implementation of technology in other areas so collaboration with the psychology department or collaboration with justice or collaboration with the social impact office and the office of civic engagement in the college so we were able to create connections that were not made before for grants and that's what we were able to accomplish amazing results on the first year. So this year we follow the same process for when the RFP was announced we already opened for internal submission and the deadline is this week we already have at least three proposals submitted and we're going to go through the same process so what is going to be different this year that we're going to do more for those collaborations with other members of the network and with our local community partners, but also that because of the situation that we're living today. We had to modify our existing grants, the two that were awarded last year, so we're looking for proposals this year that can be adaptable that can be completed with, you know, online remote working that we have right now if we're working with students or companies we need to make sure that we can achieve the outcomes that we're going to be proposing so those are the details that we are changing from last year just to make sure that we can accomplish the results on the current situation that we have. So I think I covered the basic questions but I'm hoping to question from the audience. Thanks for that Antonio and and we're finally at Jennifer. Thank you so much for that. Hi, I'm Jennifer Lyon Gardner I'm Associate Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin, which is another very large research intensive institution similar to the others that have other people that have spoken so far. And so our, you know, some of our processes are pretty similar things that have been described here already in that we already have a very well established limited submission process in which we share out funding opportunities broadly. It's always really important for us to be doing that, you know, in an equitable way where the whole campus is finding out about opportunities we use an online submission portal for people to put in their submissions finding information. But in, you know, in particular instances like PITUN, where you may have, you know, funding opportunity for a very specific kind of research we often use a both and approach, where in addition to posting the funding opportunity and making sure that we've announced it through our various lists and services into all the colleges and schools and the leadership there to pass down and also posting it on our VPR website publicly. We'll also go and send, you know, individual emails to certain PIs or groups of PIs that we think might be particularly well suited for the opportunity and say hey I want to make sure that you saw this. You know, it seems like that project you've been working on about XYZ might be a good fit for this maybe you want to think about it. We found that to be a pretty effective strategy just to make sure that things, you know, that people don't miss an opportunity because they just missed an email. One way we're able to do that pretty well is that we have a real advantage that the Development Office and the Advancement Office and the VPR office have a very close working relationship. And so we have regular meetings, VPR and development have a regular standing meeting where we kind of go through all these opportunities and when the President's office was first, you know, considering joining Pitt UN as a charter member, development and VPR were part of that discussion and part of that decision from the very, very beginning. And so even before, even when this RFP was anticipated before it was coming out, you know, we knew this was coming, we were already thinking about and kind of together development of VPR going through our roll adexes of who's a good fit for this and socializing the concept with them. And a lot of them had been hearing about it because they're scholars in the field. And so as Pitt UN was forming, it was, you know, becoming news within their field too. Another advantage that we had is that is that we already had a critical mass of public interest technology researchers not only identified but already working together collaboratively through a campus wide research grand challenge that we have go that we've had going on for several years before this that it started in 2016 called good systems, which is an ethics and artificial intelligence grand challenge. We actually have three grand challenges good systems is one and the other two also focus on co developing with Texas communities, technology solutions to benefit those communities one focuses on climate change natural disaster data integration and one focuses on bio behavioral health and resilience to adversity. So we knew from the get go that we could at least have some strong teams, you know, that had a history that had external partners, and, you know, and some shovel ready ideas coming out of those grand communities. In addition, there were some other some other PI from the School of Information, some other places computer science that we socialize this with, you know, as we as we put the call out. Ultimately, you know, we, we kind of, we kind of, you know, soft ideated with multiple groups ahead of time, you know, it became apparent for various reasons timeline, other this noise is my dog coming in, sorry. You guys know when there's years you'll see in a second. There he is, he's behind me. There he is. So, so, as I was saying, you know, due to timelines and other constraints, ultimately there were four groups that that, you know, that had strong ideas and they were ready to put them together. And both development and my office work with them to develop those proposals. So there was a lot of, you know, going back and forth with development and BPR and a guiding the PIs in terms of what this university network was is about challenges about, you know, what the goals were. I, you know, I also served as a reviewer on the, for this first round of the challenge last year, which I always try to take that opportunity when it's offered to me because I think there's no better way to get an understanding of what, you know, what a given funder wants and to get an understanding of the landscape and what peers are doing and other folks are doing. And so that was a hugely valuable experience to be on the review committee. And I'm definitely going to take what I learned from that experience back this year to my campus as we work on our proposals for this year. So that's my, that's my, that's my rough summary. I guess there's only one other thing I would say, which is that just to summarize our typical limits, submission processes that we do use ad hoc faculty peer review committees to look through, to look through proposals that with with input from the BPR and myself and with input from development, you know, given what we might know about a given sponsor, what it is they're looking for, what the goals are. We provide written feedback to any to all submitters, whether they're selected to go forward or whether they're not. And as far as, you know, this year and the COVID-19 situation, I would say our whole process is such it works asynchronously as is, you know, so reviewers look at their look at look at their things independently they submit their scores independently and independently, people are notified by email, everything's electronic so moving this to an all remote format is really no problem at all. It's already kind of done that way. Thanks for that Jennifer. I hope I hope some of those presentations was inspirational and springing up some questions for you but we also have on our team I want to introduce Ariana from Arabella advisors. And she'll introduce herself and sort of talk a little bit about her role and some of the questions that she can answer for you to Sure, absolutely. Thanks, Andrew. It's great to be connected with you all I'm here on the line with my colleague, Maryam from Arabella. I'll start a little bit with with how we plug into this I think it's helpful to know and sort of see who's doing what in the background. So Arabella, we are engaging with new venture fund we partner with new venture fund to lead the application process due diligence review and award the grants new venture fund engaged us Arabella to do this work new venture fund houses and chat the challenge and manages the process they're a 501 C3 and they support and sponsor a range of projects in many issue areas so we are happy to support them. We are closely involved with the RFP guiding the evaluation committee through their review process. And so happy to answer any questions that that come our way about any of those sort of more technical details. I'll pass it to Maryam quickly if you want to say hello to the group. Hi, yeah, I'll just say hello I'm Maryam and sorry. And as Arianna mentioned I'm working very closely with her and I'm managing the process that she outlined. We're excited to be here and happy to answer any of the, again, she said more technical questions that you might have about the process so thank you. So I'm, I'm eager to get some of your questions but I'm going to start us off, start us rolling. We cannot ignore COVID-19. Some of some of us are going to be more challenged in this process than others, but I'm curious though to talk about so how do you think COVID-19 is going to impact the approach you take the projects that are going to theoretically launch January 2021. What's been your approach and thinking around that of the panelists. You could, for all the panelists you can use your, you can sort of raise your hand to let me know which one's ready to go. So I will say as I explained before, just because of the experience of being awarded and to active grants that we were on track that we were pursuing and suddenly we were in the middle of COVID-19 and our students were sent home our staff working from home, and we have to re-adapt and it's great to have that flexibility from from from PIT to adapt. So not about the existing grants, but the new proposals that we have is how to look into those flexible outcomes and to think that we're not going to go back to where we were, and at least not for the next year. And these second year proposals are going to be for the execution in 2021. So we need to make sure that those proposals are going to come out are ready for COVID-19, ready for the new morality of working from home, working remotely, connection with students in different modalities, working with our partners without flexibility that no matter what happens, we are ready to provide the deliverables that we're going to be committed to. Anyone else? Anyone else having a particular think it's going to be challenging to think through COVID-19 and how that might impact the applications and how we should think about the applications? Dan, looks like you're, you can unmute. Yeah, so I mean, I think it could, I mean, there, there's a silver lining, I guess, in that it could provide a whole new opportunity for, for new new areas. In terms of, you know, when you think about contact tracing, or you think about tracking the spread of COVID and its target to underrepresented under privileged communities and things like that, but those are public interest technology questions at their very heart so there could be some really interesting proposals that develop out of it. I agree with what's been said before from a grant review side. I think most of what can be done wouldn't be very different from what's been done in the past. In terms of, you know, convening a review panel like this or having people review asynchronously and provide their responses. And I think, I think it was said really well that flexibility is going to be the key and I think anybody who's writing a grant right now is, is cognizant of that and, and planning contingencies right that if if we don't get back to classrooms as they were that that this needs to be able to carry on so I think I think they'll be inherited the proposals but be interesting to see. Thanks for that Dave. I saw you. Yeah, I think Andrian reiterating something I think that that you and I have discussed. I've emphasized to people who are interested in writing proposals here that despite the emphasis on generating partnerships that the that the RFP suggests is important that people really should understand things that are already established that it would probably be incredibly difficult to plan a project that is about establishing new partnerships and new relationships beyond ones that already exist, particularly where a lot of those entrepreneurs may be coming from the not for profit world, which is exceptionally fragile, and will continue to be so over the next. Well, your two years three years. I've seen another question which I think is really helpful for us. Aside from the LSO process which is the limited submission process has anyone else taken another approach to solicit ideas across the campus. I'm happy to see any anyone share that in the chat. That'd be really helpful to know. Not everyone sort of went through that process, but some have done something similar, without having the official office which is to do what Dan suggested which is to have an event, and use that event as a springboard to engage others. Dave, are you see your hand raised. Okay, another question that's come to us, which I'm curious for the panel panelists to address is this year's RFP offers sort of explicit recommendation DEI recommendations for projects rather than the more open process that we offered last year. Do you think that might change or impact how you approach the applications there. Last year we sort of ask you to sort of define how you approach DEI internally, but this year we've made some prescriptions anyone want to tackle that question. I would answer similarly to what Dave just said in his last response which is that you know for us that's going to turn into an evaluation criteria and I think at the internal competition stage is that just like we'll be considering who already has established partnerships with external stakeholders and how meaningful are those partnerships will also be considering you know who has actually embodied diversity and equity and inclusion. You know through their activities and actions thus far so who has the track record and who you know who's committed to who's committed to continuing to enhance that through through this project. My last experience tells me that in other, you know, other internal competitions that we've had on campus. This is actually a pretty good, pretty good defining criterion, you know, in terms of in terms of the people if people have been taking this seriously than they, you know they have, they have evidence to show they have a track record to show. Does anyone have something to say about sort of the Dave's point around sort of leaning in on older partnerships and versus sort of new partners and what that might mean. We want to definitely make sure the challenge is responsive of course to the needs of folks that are suffering but we can we can understand that that's going to be potentially a tricky moment. Tony, you talked quite a bit about reaching out to community members as a community college. Do you see that impacting the process for you and your college. Yeah, Dave has had a great point on that that a lot of nonprofits might be suffering and even when we might be agreeing to a partnership, the nonprofit might not be able to deliver in the short term or midterm. So that that's important when you are selecting your partners in our case like Microsoft has been a great partner and that's definitely going to stay longer. But and Microsoft, the Civic Engagement Office of Microsoft here locally that helping us reach out to some of their projects with nonprofits so we have like a big company as a backup to work within those projects so that always help. And this year, the different approach or not different but but something that we're definitely looking after is maybe new partnerships that they don't need to be all part like existing partnership but new partnership with with existing members of the network. So projects that we might be aligned and could be a new partnership of members and that's something that the RFP is looking for that collaboration between members and and we are actively looking into those collaborations. We are not a research institution so sometime that helps that we bring more the community and the implementation side and we can partner with a more the research side. And so we're looking that in between the week. At the end of projects that we're going to select are the ones that can definitely deliver and that we cannot trust and let's see what happens in the next six months we need to make sure that the partners are the ones that can deliver. There's a question on there's a question about sort of the FAQ list the grant period between January 2021 and January 2022. Has there been discussion about longer grant periods 18 months two years at the same funding level. I'm with the specific reporting deadlines well one thing to note, just from your one grants is that we have extended the period for for quite a number of the grants because a lot of the grants expect they expected to have summer and spring events. That's not going to happen there are quite a lot of our projects that are constrained. So we've actually extended many of the projects through to the end of the year. And we'll revisit we'll revisit that as needed. Similarly, I think an approach will be taken to any new grant that is funded in January 21 we will look to evaluate the next six months out in into the project what needs to happen. I also honestly quite honestly expect that we will, we will fund projects. Everyone will know in the fall and you may have to revisit your timeline even then, because there probably will be a clearer picture in the fall about your institutions. One of the benefits of doing a challenge with the network is that we have access to the folks who are going to be doing this work and so we can have quite a bit of back and forth. So as long as you all keep us in the loop, we're happy, happy to extend the time and all of the things that you're going to need for the grant period. We're really going to be flexible about that. Any other questions. One thing I think, I think Dan you referenced this but I think the case can also be made here. Can we talk can you all talk a little bit about how you think COVID-19 has made the case for a pit from framework or approach on your campus. And have you all begun to talk about that. Yeah. So, right before, excuse me, right before this zoom and I actually had to jump off I was on with the some of the leadership and some of the campus network of ASU's Bio Design Institute and the Bio Design Institute is our translational Bio Medicine Environmental Research Institute. And it is quite astonishing to me the way the whole apparatus of bio design our College of Nursing our College of Health Solutions and so on we don't have a medical school here at ASU has reoriented itself for a whole set of interventions in the context of the COVID pandemic from setting up testing to working with the state on unfortunately not the county on contact tracing and things like that. And that is representative of a whole set of new activities that have gone on, but within a framework that the university in essence had already articulated through a set of values that are enshrined in the university charter and the way that the university president has expressed what it is that that we're after as a university. And so the what's gone on has really been across a set of dimensions including the biological including the digital including you know what passes here is as medical and public health and embracing the social sciences in a way that if it were performed you know as robustly under normal circumstances and and at a broad front would really I think demonstrate both the incredible power of the concept of public interest technology as well as the incredible power of universities to participate in its conceptualization and implementation. Thanks for that thing. Dave, one thing at that one thing I want to make clear as well and quite a number of individuals on this panel has talked talked about the the role of their development offices in this. And so while we may not have a limited submission. Some might not have that your development teams have been in conversation with your communications teams, starting early in early in March with the spit spitfire strategies and the Ford Foundation folks who have been trying to facilitate a conversation around thinking through how do you talk about public interest technology and with your comms team and and also how do you support some of the projects that might emerge out of a challenge. I wanted I want to encourage you all to talk a little bit about that process, obviously you all said, you know we we limited the number of applications that you could submit to the network challenge. I believe and don't know you talked a little bit about what happened with some of the other, the other projects that didn't make it through. This is such a key part in relationship building so can you all talk a little bit about that as well and how how you all to be submitted. Yeah, so I think I think one of the things that was critical in and you know whether or not this came about from limited submission process or not, having people who review the grants, give feedback to the people who submitted and, you know, as, as Jennifer said, people who have attended the grant review process with pit UN and sort of sitting with them and seeing how it worked on a, you know, once the whole network was together and submitting and I think the key is about how that worked, and getting feedback is really helpful in terms of thinking for round two, you know, thinking about lessons learned and, and other approaches and I think Antonio's point about, you know, we're all sort of all, all of all of the network members are all in the same position right now and leveraging those partnerships and thinking about how we can use those partnerships to, to draft new proposals I think is a really smart idea and so I, for us, as I said before, we framed everything about being proud to be a member of the university network. And that really built off of our communications team sort of announcement of pit UN and once once it was announced we sort of talked about developing the conference and then talked about the challenge grant. And so they all sort of fell into sequence with each other and we couldn't have done it without without our development team and without without our communications team. So it's a really good point. I have a question that I'm one question from a attendee I want to get this out there because I think many might be feeling the same way. The question is my university is overwhelmed and seem unable to focus on this now. They recognize the importance of the initiative and want to be supportive but senior research officials have made it clear that they until they know if and how they will have classes. This call will not be a priority. And I think someone else I believe someone also mentioned this Dave you mentioned this I was told the amounts are an insignificant incentive. Can you all help me put forward arguments to get them to move. Any help from our attendee that Antonio, go ahead. I will say that this is an amazing network that just the fact to be a member of this selected group is unique. So, and then not only that we are a few members but then this grant opportunity that is expanding from year one to year two is the expansion is huge. So, even when you might see this as a small grant, either 4590 or 180,000 dollars. It is a unique opportunity to get into it. You might be new to your institution or might not. Maybe you have something in place already that you can leverage as Dave said before if you have something in place. Why not just apply and see if you can create expanding to not only for your institution but sharing with everyone on the network. So, these are difficult times for everyone. And of course, if this is something extra or something new that is not on the radar or not a priority is even more difficult. But if you find the right candidates are already working in something that is similar or that can be related in some way to opportunity, it is a unique opportunity and the network is so flexible and they're always looking for the new members and new participation, the new engagement. So, I will definitely encourage everyone to submit at least one application. And go with the resources that the network is providing and try to do it. Jennifer, I see you. And then Dave I see you. So, I would second that in the sense that, you know, you don't have to aim for maxing out the number of applications you turn in, you know, it's really all about the right fit. This is kind of a special call in terms of, you know, in terms of the topic and what it's looking for. And, you know, and so it makes the most sense if you have, if you have a PI or PI who have an idea that really is the right fit. And I already talked about a couple criteria. You know that if you don't already have these pieces in place. It may, you know, maybe kind of difficult to try to start from scratch and that is, you know, do you have external, you know, have you engaged externally with stakeholders or community. And, you know, are you committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. And if those pieces aren't truly there, or if you're trying to fit, you know, a square peg into a round hole in terms of just looking for a funding source for an idea that might not necessarily align, then sure that might not possibly fit. I think it's really just about identifying that right fit. I do want to comment on the point of, you know, institutional leadership business supporting areas and behind it. You know, I'm an, I'm an AVP now I sit in a VPR office. I'm in the fortunate position that our VPR development office do support this and are behind it but before I was an AVP, I worked in a college. In previous administrations on campus, you know, we would see this happen where upper administration might not prioritize something that the college wanted to or somebody else wanted to. And to that I would say, you know, make an impact from where you're at. You don't necessarily need, you know, the highest level on campus to agree to run it as a limb sub, for example. Right. If you, you know, if you've got PIs or groups in your constituents that you serve and support that want to go for this, then help them go for it. And, and, you know, I'd say make make, you know, make the impact how you can from from where you're at. Dave and then Dan. Yeah, I mean, while it's incredibly hard to convince people who see existential threats to pay attention to something that does not apparently intersect with that. Existential threat. I'd certainly support what the two folks just said and, you know, maybe Andrean. I could turn this back to the network leadership and funders for a second. Maybe there's a way that some additional fundraising could be done to support a different track of proposals that specifically address pit related COVID related activities on the campuses and one could think of a whole host of those things. The, you know, first obvious one is, you know, the sort of privacy elements of digital contact tracing. And that's something that, you know, that a number of campuses could could do some of it might also be the, you know, the deployment of what technologies might otherwise be native at the College of University in question for COVID related, specific COVID related activities like, you know, repurposing 3D printers and so on. There are a whole host of things that many of the university network members could actually think about doing that would mesh with rather than, you know, potentially conflict with the COVID imperatives. PowerPoint. I think to think about Dan, I want to make sure you get a chance to say what you needed. Yeah, just, I mean, I guess, a couple things. One thing, I mean, in the grand scheme of things. When you put this on on par with research grants. It's not a lot of money, but one way to think about what it is, is it's sort of a So it's, you know, an opportunity to cement your position within the network, you know, that, that, you know, I think all of us probably before we became members of the network had things that were going on across our colleges and universities that would fit within public interest technology is But in a way that this is an opportunity to use some money to to reinforce that right to reinforce that behind a title of this is something that belongs to the public interest technology university network. And the other thing that I want to say is one thing that worked really well I think with our senior leadership was the idea of workforce development and that providing technology skills for students that may not have it. And I think one of the major's was a real selling point that those those students would then be more marketable and we had really good data on people who are providing internships for students in New York City. And that technology skills data science skills and other skills were, were things that they were interested in gaining students from public interest areas majors to have. So that that really I thought sold well for us that we were able to talk to senior leadership and say look at this opportunity that we can provide for students to make them more marketable in the job market, which is really competitive. And, and I think that that went a long way for us. Dan, thank you for that. I want to be sensitive to time. I think we're just about to hit the hour mark but I wanted to point out just a couple of things. First, quite a number of you in your two put together working groups in order to develop your applications. My first instinct would be to go to that working group as your internal group to source for applications. I've heard a model for engaging the entire university. However, you, we are aware, I'm aware that you, we are all in crisis at this moment and so that's going to be very tricky and even for those who said that they worked with a senior office, having the material, the information be distributed broadly broadly was still a challenge. It wasn't very much a challenge, even though that office existed. So I think that you can maximize the, the working groups that many of you pulled together to generate your application I think that's a really good source to get an application going. And year one, year one members often talked about the fact that it was as a result of launching the challenge that they developed those relationships. So in many ways, you are a little bit ahead of the curve by by virtue of the fact that you actually participated in a application process as year two attendees as your year two members of the network. That's just a happy, happy news as well. And then also, I think Jennifer said this work, Jennifer maybe Antonio said work to at least submit one application. That is, it's still very valuable to us because I think part of part and parcel of that is to be able to see how you are able to to figure out who is a good ground and a soft soil for potential partnerships next year. The other piece, Antonio emphasized this, collaborate with other network members. Let one of the other network members take the do some of the heavy lifting if they have the resources and the capacity that you might not have now, but you have something that you can bring to the table in partnership. That's a big part of this work for us is that we would love to have you all collaborate on projects where you are bringing your strength to the table with others. That's really vital and valuable for us and that's, that is the strengthening the pit UN category on the ground application. And so I'm just, I'm, if any of the other panelists, if you all are comfortable leaving it here. Everyone is good. I'm just looking to make sure. Okay. One thing I want to say is that you can continue to share your questions, please email any additional questions, no matter how simple complex, embarrassing potentially all of those things please share those questions at the pit UN challenge at new venture fund.org. We will be updating our FAQ with responses to your questions weekly and sharing it on our website, the New America University Network website, you can find, you can find the link to the challenge. Each week we will be updating it and sending it out to the network and so just look for your responses there. Also, as a reminder, we sent out a survey this week. Make sure that we're anticipating any challenges that COVID-19 is presenting for all of you. Please fill out those surveys. Again, this is a network effort if it's not going to be viable for a good, a good batch of the network we really need to make sure that we're going to be responsive to all that you're raising. So thank you all so much for participating and coming in and listening to our panelists talk about their year one experiences. Thank you, Antonio. Thank you, Dave, Jennifer and Dan and Ariana and Marianne, Marianne for for helping us get through this hour together in our homes. So this, this webinar will be saved and placed on on our Google repository folder for pit you and members your designees have access to that. That's another thing please do reach out to your designees and talk to them about this process if there are others on the call that are not designees. We really work with the designees to facilitate this process. It's a bit tricky. We can't sort of publicly announce the challenge widely because we understand that this is there are internal processes at work. But this is another way for you to develop relationships with your designees and talk through any of the interesting projects that you think might be something that they should explore. And unless there are any more questions. I think I see a few but they're probably just in the chat. All right, thank you all so much we really appreciate this and next time around we'll see you will see you maybe in another webinar if it if it if you determine that it's necessary. Thank you all so much and have a great rest of the day and stay safe and healthy out there.