As I go on the academic job market, both I and departments are asking how a widely-adopted public-interest project can sustainably work alongside our goals for research, teaching, and service. Re-reading notes from others who have done this well.
.@pgbovine has written extensively about the creation of pythontutor and how it related to his career arc as a gradstudent and faculty. Here's the origin story for pythontutor (used by 3.5 million people in 180+ countries) pgbovine.net/python-tutor-h…
Here's @pgbovine's 2015 research statement, where he described the pragmatic need and the potential contributions to science from designing and studying interactive systems for learning programming at scale: pgbovine.net/apps/faculty-2…
.@vineet1pandey is a current PhD candidate at @DesignLabUCSD who leads "Gut Instinct," a project that organizes the public to collaboratively create, test, and replicate scientific theories about the microbiome gutinstinct-prod.ucsd.edu/info/ His site is here: vineetp13.github.io
.@sayamindu, now an assistant professor at UNC, created systems for children to develop research questions & do data science on their own social data. medium.com/hci-design-at-… Along the way, Sayamindu advances theories about how young people learn: unmad.in
.@karen_brennan now associate professor of Education at Harvard, created ScratchEd while a PhD student. In this online community, educators around the world share ideas for improving classroom practices. It's also a source for Karen's ethnographic research scratched.gse.harvard.edu
Open Mind Common Sense, @havasi's PhD, is another example– crowdsourcing word meanings to help computers understand language. The project has been used for countless research papers since its launch in 1999: conceptnet.io Catherine is currently leading a tech company
Max Larrivée was a post-doc at the University of Ottawa in 2010 when he developed eButterfly, an ornithological network tracking butterfly biodiversity & conservation. He's now section head, entomological collections & research at the Montréal Insectarium e-butterfly.org
.@LuisvonAhn coined the term "human computation" as a PhD student. In 2007, a year after starting as a faculty at Carnegie Mellon, Luis launched ReCaptcha, a system to jointly identify humans & digitize books. It was acquired by Google in 2009. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
In 2007, 3 years into his asst prof position at Emerson @ericbot started the first projects that led to the creation of Emerson's @EngageLab: an applied research & design lab focused on media + tech for reducing disparities in civic participation. elab.emerson.edu/about
Projects that involve public participation often surprise us. @gleemie & @trihybrid created @turkopticon as a critical art/design project while PhD students, not expecting that it would be widely used. They wrote about their surprise & responsibility here: dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?i…
Many projects that inspired me as a gradstudent were started by tenured faculty, I later learned. @JPAL_Global, @UChiUrbanLabs, @scratch, @CrimsonHexagon @citizenlab @aliceprojectcmu were all started w/ faculty who could build on the stability of tenure, alums, & funding networks
I learned a lot about growing public-interest research infrastructures from the @media_cloud team, by seeing @EthanZ & @YBenkler grow it together. Having a tenured & junior faculty team + tech staff have helped them support a great deal of scholarship & journalism over the years
.@kmitts informs me that the amazing Amy Smith started an early iteration of @dlab_mit as a *master's student* at MIT with a project to develop & field test grain mills with communities in Senegal. D-Lab now has 25+ staff and hundreds of students d-lab.mit.edu/about/people/a…
Just as with any startup, a high risk/reward payoff is associated with research projects that require public participation. Sometimes a project doesn't attract enough interest. Sometimes it's *so* successful that the founder struggles to balance their faculty job with the project
.@nathan_jana started the @Jana project, which combines advertising + research + internet access. They have helped 40 million people get online. After a period as junior faculty at Harvard, Nathan has retained the affiliation while focusing on Jana as CEO alumni.media.mit.edu/~nathan/
Thoughtful comment by @gleemie about the influence of tenure requirements on public interest projects
Lilly describes an approach she used with a participant-led project to protect participants from her tenure pressures:
Wonderfully reflexive thread by @mattratto on his work with @niatech on prosthetic & orthotic tech to help children walk, how it relates to his research on critical design, and the challenges of reconciling it with his STS-oriented scholarship & values
Lilly writes about the workload for junior faculty when a public interest project mismatches the pulls of tenure. I'm grateful that my own project's mission is to do research, but it also means saying no often, and there are still many non-research demands
