EAGER: Collaborative Research: FLASH! Fueling Learning Alliance in Sustainability in Higher education: Using social media and networks for science

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While there has been considerable evidence of the utility of social media to enable high levels of collaboration and communication among distributed and diverse scientific communities, there is very little empirical evidence about the utility of social media to help individuals find the right people to connect with in these communities. Connecting with the right individuals is particularly catalytic in creating large scale innovation and acceptance of global issues such as sustainable development which transcends geography, culture and disciplines. We propose to apply the insights gained from an NSF VOSS project (at Northwestern University) investigating what motivates the formation of effective networks in virtual organizations to enhance mentoring practices in the NSF SEES project (anchored at Colorado State University) developing the Global Women Scholars Network (GWSN). Our goal is to implement and evaluate the utilization and outcome of a social recommender system that will seek to enhance cross-mentoring of grassroots women with academics, policy leaders and students in the globally-scaled knowledge network for sustainability. We take a risky step in testing the hypothesIs that social network recommender systems are an effective way to address the lingering gap between women and men in the sciences and policy decision-making associated with sustainable development. We posit that social recommender systems create a knowledge network cloud that merges across cultural, geographic, and institutional gaps (grassroots to academic, women to students, and policy makers to graduate students). Such a cloud network is one way that can make a transformational change in how science is communicated and who is engaged in that communication.