The STEM Saturdays program, launched in 2017 under the direction of George Delagrammatikas, professor of mechanical engineering at the Cooper Union, aims to engage talented, at-risk New York City high school students in engineering activities. The curriculum focuses on teaching in-depth understanding of microcontroller applications and computer programming skills and includes lunch time presentations on the college admissions process, career development, intellectual property, and patent law. Students work with electronic circuits, switches, resistors, digital inputs, LCDs, DC motors, photocells, RFID modules, and IR receivers. They also learn to program computers to create a “smart home,” with connected lighting, HVAC, and motion alarm systems; and work in teams to develop a design project using engineering principles to solve current, real-world problems. This grant provides three years of operational support for the continuation of STEM Saturdays. In addition to continued operation of the program, grant funds will support a series of program improvements, including increased training of the mentors, and more timely access to instructional materials. In addition, Cooper Union will formally link STEM Saturdays with their long?running Summer STEM program to create a progression of STEM college readiness support for underserved students; formally incorporate both programs into their undergraduate admissions strategy to increase diversity within their STEM enrollment; develop the financial and institutional support for long?term sustainability of the program; and engage other New York City STEM outreach programs to expand opportunities for students across New York City.

BetaNYC aims to improve civic technology and open data usage in New York City. The organization partners with New York’s borough president offices and the 59 community boards under them, focusing on how better use of technology and access to data can improve on-the-ground decision-making at a hyper-local scale. Among many other activities, BetaNYC runs a Civic Innovation Fellows program, which puts CUNY undergraduates to work identifying and addressing technology needs at borough president offices and community boards; offers open data training to municipal government workers; developed an open data dashboard to allow community board members to quickly and intuitively access relevant data, like the number and type of complaints received; and has launched several new software tools to inform community-level issues like liquor licensing or tenant disputes. Funds from this grant provide two years of operational support for BetaNYC.

Devoted to cultivating the community of software engineers living in and around New York City, hackNY runs community-building hackathons as well as a marquee summer fellowship that combines internships with networking and cohort training in practical career skills. As a complement to summer intern programs run by Google and Facebook, the hackNY internship program specifically works with start-up companies that do not have the resources to run their own efforts. Funds from this grant provide operational support for hackNY for two years.

Stencila is a spreadsheet tool that enables researchers to execute Python, R, or SQL code from within individual cells alongside data and Excel-style formulae. The promise of a platform like Stencila is that it allows researchers who are comfortable in Excel to exploit the universe of disciplinary and statistical libraries in open source languages like Python and R without having to wholly embrace a different way of working. Funds from this grant support efforts by New Zealand–based scientist Nokome Bentley to expand the power and user base of Stencila. Plans involve identification of and outreach to researchers most likely to find Stencila useful, the implementation of several new features designed to ease adoption of the platform, the further growth of a community of committed open source developers, and efforts to diversify the project’s funding base.

Adapted from SkyServer, the data portal for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, SciServer is an open source data management and archiving platform aimed at meeting the data management needs of large research collaborations at a disciplinary or interdisciplinary scope. These collaborations often have unique data management challenges anchored to a particular instrument, facility, type of data, or field campaign that are unmet by archiving and management platforms built to serve as generic data archiving platforms. SciServer, in contrast, is built to integrate datasets and lower barriers to aggregate querying and analysis. Funds from this grant provide one year of operating support for SciServer as the project’s founder, Alexander Szalay, seeks to diversify and stabilize the platform’s funding base.

The grant funds work by a team at the NYU Libraries including David Millman, director of Digital Library Technology Services, and Vicky Steeves, reproducibility librarian, to examine how researchers use the popular code versioning site Github and its underlying technology platform Git. The team will document the ways in which current Git-based systems are incompletely serving the needs of academic researchers and libraries during the software design process. This will include a gap analysis, landscape research, user study, and development of functional requirements to improve Git from the standpoint of academic research. The result will be a set of recommendations to more overtly align Git platforms with academic institutions and incentive structures.

In 2016, Andrew Russell (now Professor and Dean of Arts & Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute) and Lee Vinsel (now Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech) hosted a three-day workshop, “The Maintainers,” held at the Stevens Institute for Technology, that included presentations from a handful of practitioners who were responsible for maintenance of technological infrastructure such as aerospace, transportation, information technology, and the military. Interest in the workshop was robust and a second workshop followed in 2017, also well attended. This grant provides support to Russell and Vinsel for plans to grow and formalize the set of experts, researchers, and practitioners interested in issues of technological maintenance. Over the next year they request funds to develop two pilot “maintenance communities,” one of “information maintainers” and the other of “maintainers in the workforce.” Through these two pilot communities Russell and Vinsel hope to produce a blueprint for how maintainer communities might be effectively structured. Additional grant funds support preparatory work in advance of a 2019 Maintainers conference.

The conversation around data privacy and what constitutes appropriate access to sensitive data for research purposes has generally focused on quantitative data. Social scientists who work in whole or part with qualitative data have largely been left out of the data privacy conversation, and platforms for archiving ethnographic, interview, video, and other qualitative data haven’t yet engaged issues of cross-study search or analysis. This grant funds a two-year study led by Nic Weber and Carole Palmer of the University of Washington School of Library and Information of the privacy dimensions of qualitative research data. The project aims to produce a set of functional and technical specifications that will enable appropriate access to and sharing of qualitative data. Weber and Palmer will gather a broad set of use cases from both research case studies and scenario-focused interviews, which will then inform the initial design of a data curation protocol that ensures the contextual integrity of sensitive data collections and enhances the propensity of sensitive data to be reused. That protocol will then be implemented in both a tool for researchers to easily generate structured provenance metadata for sensitive qualitative data and a set of functional and technical requirements that will be piloted at Syracuse University’s Qualitative Data Repository.