DCL: NSF INCLUDES The Technical and Human Infrastructure to Support Collective Impact of the INCLUDES Program at the Alliance and Network Levels

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As the NSF INCLUDES Program seeks to scale from the Launch Pilots to the full program, achieving its goals to promote the progress of science by broadening participation will rely on the ability to successfully scale the technical and human infrastructure for collaboration across the mini-backbones and the national backbone. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is seeking support for an NSF INCLUDES infrastructure conference that will provide a forum for discussion about current and long term technical and human infrastructure needs for scaling. Technical infrastructure might refer to the functions provided by any communication, community building and collaboration tool, such as document sharing or storage. Human infrastructure might refer to data analysts or community managers. The conference would include discussion of the structures and processes for creating a shared, overarching vision of the changes at all levels and for all groups that would be needed to promote the talent development goals envisioned within INCLUDES, supporting the current design and development launch pilots, and supporting scaling and promoting conditions for sustainability. Based on research on collective impact and improvement science in education, we would offer presentations followed by structured conversations within the setting of working sessions. The goals of AAAS for diversity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are very much in keeping with the goals of INCLUDES; thus AAAS proposes to offer its existing online platform, Trellis, to support this comprehensive initiative to develop STEM talent from all sectors and groups in our society. The goals of the conference activity are to: (1) define short term and long term communications and networking needs that can support the pilots; (2) outline the technical specifications and human resources needed to support the pilots; (3) envision the technical, resource and human needs required to support Alliances; (4) develop design specifications for intra- and cross Alliance networking to support technical assistance, identification and curation of resources, support for communities of practice and capture of lessons learned and (5) propose tools, techniques, capacities and functionalities for an NSF INCLUDES National Network Backbone.