2022 Smart and Connected Communities Principal Investigators' Meeting
The major goal of the fourth S&CC PI Meeting held Monday, October 10 (arrival night) – Tuesday, October 11 & Wednesday, October 11, 2022 (meeting days) at the Crystal Gateway Marriott in Arlington, Virginia, was to organize the end-to-end planning, organization, and execution of the meeting. The 2022 S&CC PI Meeting could be remembered for a number of interesting “firsts”. The 2022 S&CC PI Meeting was:
- The first to be held in parallel with the public launching of the Smart & Connected Communities Virtual Organization (SCC-VO; https://sccvo.org/).
- The first with a public website on the S&CC VO. (The first two S&CC PI Meeting websites were created on an external university website and linked to the CPS VO platform, and the third and fourth PI Meetings were built and hosted directly on the CPS VO platform.)
- Coincided with the five-year anniversary of the NSF S&CC program.
- The first in-person PI Meeting since 2019, where the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 was largely responsible for no meeting being held in 2020 and a virtual PI Meeting being held in 2021.
- The first S&CC PI Meeting that was held on the East Coast since these meetings commenced in 2018. (Past meetings have been held on the West Coast or virtually.
The meeting was attended by 245 stakeholders represented nearly 90 U.S. colleges and universities and research labs located in 25 U.S. states; one international university; nearly 20 local municipal and county governments, agencies, and school systems; nearly 10 industry organizations; nearly 20 community-based organizations, foundations, and associations; four U.S. Federal agencies; and one international Government agency. Since its inception in 2017 and at the time of the 2022 meeting, the S&CC program has supported more than 150 projects with over $120M in awards across 200 communities located in 44 states, Washington D.C., and abroad. S&CC PI meetings are designed for PIs to report on the progress of their research to NSF, to learn from and network with each other, and hear about the state of the program and contribute to shaping its future direction. The program kicked off with remarks by NSF Program Officers who reported on the progress of the S&CC program over the past five years. Other meeting sessions featured:
- A keynote presentation panel on perspectives on from local government on smart communities and emerging technologies featuring Kate Burns (MetroLab Network), Santiago Garcia (Chief Innovation Officer, Boston), and Ashley Hand (Director of Strategic Communications at Unified Government of Kansas City).
- Other technical panels on the topics of From the Lab to Implementation: S&CC Success Stories; The Role of Social Sciences in S&CC; Smart& Connected Rural Communities; International Partnerships in S&CC; and Reimagining Communities in a Changing Climate and interactive breakout sessions on the same topics.
- Two mini-workshops on the topics of Planning Grants to IRG and Scaling, Sustaining, and Transferring Impact of S&CC Projects.
- Project poster and demonstrations and demonstration sessions that highlighted important aspects of the program, including its success stories, challenges, and future. Posters presentations were grouped into topic categories including Transportation; Health and Wellbeing; Water, Energy, and Food; Community, Planning, Education, and the Workforce; and Disaster Resilience and Emergency Management
Three programmed networking receptions, including an informal reception on the arrival night, a full reception on the evening of day one, and an informal reception immediately after the meeting adjournment on meeting day two.
The two-day meeting sessions ended with a NSF PD-led session on “Reflections, Feedback, Ask the NSF PDs, and closing remarks.
Based on the results of the post-meeting questionnaire, following are responses from the survey participants of four selected questions posed:
1. Of the 61 respondents to the question: Overall, how would you rate the 2022 S&CC PI Meeting?, 57% rated the meeting as "Excellent", 36.1% rated it as "Very Good", and 6.6% rated is as "Good".
2. Of the 61 respondents to the question: What is your preferred format for the S&CC PI Meetings?, 75.4% prefer the meetings to be "in-person"; 0% prefer "virtual only";13.1% prefer "hybrid meetings (e.g. with two-way interaction between virtual and in-person)"; 4.9% prefer to "alternate annually between virtual and in-person"; and 6.6% had "no preference".
3. Of the 61 respondents to the question: Did you have sufficient opportunities to interact and network?, 91.8% of respondents said "Yes"; and 8.2% said "No".
4. Of the 56 respondents to the question: Do you prefer future S&CC PI Meetings be held in the Spring, Summer, or Fall?, 55.4% prefer the "Fall"; 25% prefer the "Spring"; and 19.6% prefer the "Summer".
