Social, Economic, and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development Coordinating Group(SEW CG)
(Updated June 2008)
Overview
The SEW CG coordinates the activities of the Social, Economic and Workforce Implications of IT and IT Workforce Development Program Component Area (PCA).
The activities funded under the SEW PCA focus on the co-evolution of IT and social and economic systems as well as the interactions between people and IT devices and capabilities; the workforce development needs arising from the growing demand for workers who are highly skilled in information technology; and the role of innovative IT applications in education and training. SEW also supports efforts to speed the transfer of networking and IT R&D results to the policymaking and IT user communities at all levels in government and the private sector. A key goal of SEW research and dissemination activities is to enable individuals and society to better understand and anticipate the uses and consequences of IT, so that this knowledge can inform policymaking, IT designs, the IT user community, and to broaden participation in IT education and careers.
Bridging the Gap Between Research and Practice: The Collaborative Expedition Workshops
The SEW CG seeks to provide a bridge between the networking and IT R&D community and the larger arena of government policymakers and IT implementers. SEW's partnership with GSA and the Federal Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council supports the Collaborative Expedition Workshop Series. Now in their seventh year, these monthly open workshops encourage collaboration among government and community implementers of IT and demonstrate promising IT capabilities emerging from Federal research. NSF often co-sponsors these events and invites researchers to give talks on SEW-related topics in order to bridge gaps between research and policy. The focus is on emerging technologies for applications in such areas as emergency preparedness and response, environmental protection, public health and health care systems, government information services for citizens, and agency projects under the Administration's Federal Enterprise Architecture (FEA) and E-government initiatives. Workshop emphases for 2008 include:
- Scientific collaboration: Explore lessons from national science communities' "build to share" infrastructure and discovery methods (e.g., tools, governance, security, privacy)
- NITRD participation: Work with IWGs/CGs to build workshops around high-priority NITRD interests and interagency R&D topics (e.g., scientific peer/merit review, roadmapping, identity management)
Accomplishments of Expedition Workshops
Impacts of the highly successful Expedition Workshop series include:
- Broad participation: Total workshop attendance numbers in the thousands (Federal, state, and local government, academia, industry, and other communities), with 60-100 participants per workshop.
- Spread of Wiki technology: Growing use of cost-effective, efficient tool for collaborative work across the Federal government; 1,700 Wiki pages with 4,000 community files developed, drawing nearly 2 million visits; 5.2 million files downloaded to date, including public comment on E-government implementation (e.g. Federal Funding and Transparency Act)
- Communities of Practice (CoPs): More than a dozen self-organized groups totaling more than 1,000 participants (e.g., Chief Architects, Capital Planning, IT Performance Management, Enterprise Process Improvement, Knowledge Management Working Group, Semantic Interoperability, Spatial Ontology, XML, Federal XBRL, GeoSpatial, Service-Oriented Architecture, National Transportation Knowledge Network, Agile Financial Data Services, Health Information Technology Ontology Project); use Expedition Workshops to leverage learning and collaborative prototyping around data and information sharing
- Information standards: Development and implementation of reference models (e.g., National Information Exchange Model developed by DOJ, DHS for interagency sharing of critical information builds on Data Reference Model developed by CIO Council with contributions from workshop participants)
- Interoperability: Adoption of interoperability models and standards in OMB activities under FEA
For a listing of forthcoming Collaborative Expedition Workshops and the complete archive of the series, please visit:
http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ExpeditionWorkshop
