The purpose of this workshop was to engage a diverse group of smart communities’ researchers and practitioners on potential revisions to the S&CC solicitation and future priorities for the program. The report summarizing the discussions and recommendations from the February 2024 S&CC Visioning Workshop is now available. Read the full report here. 

The S&CC program at NSF was launched in 2017 to fund research that advances the state of the art in smart communities, with a focus on sociotechnical research that addresses community informed challenges and priorities. With the current solicitation set to expire on April 1, 2024, the program is considering how its mission and goals need to be revised to account for recent advancements in computing, engineering, and the social sciences, along with the evolving state of community needs and priorities. Additionally, several programs have been launched at NSF in recent years (e.g., CIVIC, SAI, ReDDDoT, RITEL) that have overlapping themes with S&CC and NSF seeks to provide greater clarity to the research community on ideas that are appropriate and in-scope for S&CC.

As such, the program is considering the following revisions to its solicitation: 

1. Increased support for high-risk/high-reward concepts, centered around technological advancements. PI’s will be encouraged to undertake foundational research in computing and engineering that carries significant risk, with proposed outcomes that will be transformative for communities if successful. 
    
2. Social and behavioral research on proposals must ask and address questions relevant to its technological goals. Ideas that primarily make contributions to social and behavioral sciences, with minimal technological advancements, will be encouraged to seek funding opportunities with programs such as ReDDDoT, SAI, and RITEL.
    
3. Acknowledging that programs like CIVIC require deep community partnerships and ready-to-pilot concepts, S&CC seeks to support more exploratory research, where ideas are informed by community perspectives, but deep partnerships are not a major requirement. Additionally, the focus on scaling, sustainability, and transferability may need to be adjusted to account for the exploratory nature of the work.
    
4. Proposals scoped for 3-4 years of research, with a maximum budget of $1.5M.  
   These high-level goals for a program revision are still at the conceptual stage and the outputs of this workshop will inform the NSF as it considers a solicitation revision.
    

Location and Date

This one-day workshop was held at Vanderbilt University on Tuesday, Feb 27th (one day prior to the 2024 NSF S&CC PI meeting) at the Vanderbilt Community Event Space, 208 24th Ave N, Nashville, TN 37240