AGEP/HRD SGER: enhancing the Cyberinfrastructure for National AGEP Integration: Rapid Prototyping and Evaluation of a Pilot NY AGEP Collaboratory

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Introduction: With the goal to address the severe national shortage in the number ofdomestic members of underrepresented populations (i.e., African Americans, Hispanics,American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians or other Pacific Islanders) pursuingdoctoral degrees in the STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics),the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Program was initiated by theNSF in 1998. During the last 7 years, the program has grown from few alliances in 1998 to 27AGEP alliances nationwide in 2005. While these AGEP alliances are required to collaborateamongst themselves in order to better fulfill the program goals, transaction costs and financialconstraints prevent them from collaborating more effectively on a regional or national basis.This limitation may hinder the full potential and growth of the AGEP Program becauseindividual alliances may miss out on opportunities for the identification and sharing of bestpractices and lessons learned from other AGEP alliances. The purpose of this project is toexplore the degree to which the strategic deployment of cyberinfrastructure can broaden anddeepen collaboration amongst AGEP alliances in NY State, as a pilot study, and to lay theempirical foundation for a larger proposal to strengthen the national integration of AGEPalliances.Intellectual Merit: To accomplish these goals for enhanced collaboration and sharing ofbest practices and resources throughout the national AGEP community, we have designed ourstudy to be implemented in two phases: The focus of Phase One will be to build a pilotcollaboratory for the emerging partnership of the New York AGEP alliances. This pilot NYAGEP Collaboratory will serve as the prototype of a National AGEP Collaboratory that may beproposed after evaluation of the pilot data. In Phase Two of the proposed project, we willexpand membership in the pilot collaboratory to the remaining three AGEP alliances on the EastCoast. Again, this pilot East Coast AGEP Collaboratory will help us to learn valuable lessons aswe plan for a proposed National AGEP Collaboratory project. Guided by literature on thedevelopment of Cyberinfrastructure and Collaboratories, we propose to study the threeoverarching domains around collaboratory practices. We characterize these domains as: (1)people-to-people; (2) people-to-information; and (3) people-to-facilities. Each of these domainsis critical to the needs of the AGEP alliances. Formative and summative evaluation of the pilotstudy will be undertaken to provide the analysis that will help in making decisions about thesubsequent phases of the project, leading up to the national AGEP Collaboratory. Areas that willbe evaluated include administrative capacity, planning and research, affiliate capacity building,and enhancing outreach capacity.Broader Societal Impacts: In addition to the project's direct impact on the participatingAGEP alliances in terms of building their capacities and increasing their efficiency to facilitatethe achievement of their objectives to support the development of more members ofunderrepresented populations achieving the doctorate in the STEM disciplines and entering theprofessoriate, the project has broader impact at regional and national levels. The universities andtheir student populations in general will benefit from increased opportunities for collaborationamongst the participating universities, including brown bags, courses, seminars, and researchopportunities. These technologies will make it easier to engage local communities in researchactivities where relevant. Nationally, the lessons learned form this project can be applied notonly to the future AGEP collaboratory, but to other loose networks and alliances ofinterdisciplinary and multi-institutional actors.