BPCnet: Scaling Up the Impact of NSF CISE Broadening Participation Activities

Computing Research Association, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

The Computing Research Association (CRA), in collaboration with the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT) and Dr. Linda Sax and her research team at UCLA, proposes to expand and enhance the BPCnet portal. As part of its commitment to broadening participation in computing (BPC), the National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) is piloting a requirement that its Principal Investigators (PIs) include a BPC plan in their projects. The online resource portal BPCnet.org was developed by CRA to assist PIs in finding and developing meaningful BPC efforts. The portal includes a range of resources: scholarly papers, programs-in-a-box, examples of existing projects that PIs can join for collective impact, and documents describing how PIs and their departments can best create their own BPC plans. In this proposal, CRA describes the next stage in the portal's development. The effort will create detailed procedures -- Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) -- for obtaining, vetting, administering, and maintaining new and current resources on the portal. It will implement a multifaceted curation strategy to obtain new resources, present resources so that they are easily accessible and searchable, and continually evaluate the portal content in order to remove or revise resources that have been judged ineffective or obsolete. The effort will launch a promotion and community engagement campaign to create awareness and use of the portal among CISE PIs. It will expand BPCnet.org to include a greater number and variety of easily accessible resources and result in portal that is more efficient, effective, and sustainable. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.