Call for RICs

Exciting Proposals! There is still time to join. Participate in the RICs

UPDATE: Deadline for the initial RIC proposal submission has been extended to  February 25th, 2024

COMPASS RICs are conceived to provide a platform for the COMPASS community to come together in partnerships with multiple stakeholders including academia, industry, NGOs, social enterprises, and impact funding agencies, with an aim to create measurable impact, broadly along the lines of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. RICs will provide the means to work on goals over multiple years along with partners to translate research efforts into impact on the ground as well as to unearth new research challenges to address. The first cohort of RICs will be launched at COMPASS 2024. To register click here.

Goals of the RICs

The RICs are envisaged to address the current silos and gaps in the landscape of computing for societal impact.

  1. Academic researchers address core research problems and publish in venues like COMPASS. However, due to the importance placed on novelty, technical depth, and pilot demonstrations or PoCs, there are no incentives nor resources available to academics to take the next step of translating their research into real impact on SDGs at scale with measurable outcomes.
  2. Individuals working with NGOs and social enterprises that are actively pursuing projects that have impact on SDGs rarely have the resources or incentives to publish their work in academic conferences, nor are such works usually recognised as novel by the current benchmarks for conference publications.
  3. Many successful enterprises and NGOs are creating significant impact on the ground and they do not bring their learning to the academic community to address new research challenges that they encounter on the field.
  4. Many academics and practitioners do have collaborations usually initiated by the academics to understand and address genuine issues on the ground with the support of the practitioner. However, obviously with exceptions, these collaborations are short-term and may or may not continue after a paper gets published. Identifying and building even such short-term partnerships requires considerable investment of time by academics and these efforts are usually not recognized or incentivized by the current academic metrics. Early career researchers thus have a serious disadvantage in building such partnerships.
  5. The added complexity is that major challenges in attaining the SDGs are in the global south and hence the most challenging research problems and proving grounds are in the global south. Thus, building meaningful long-term collaborations with practitioners in the global south is a challenge for researchers in the global north. Hence there is a need to connect researchers and practitioners across this divide. Most of these partnerships are established due to informal networks and connections, and hence the diversity of partnerships that are possible remain unexplored.
  6. For any technology solution to deliver positive impact at scale, funding is critical. However, academics may not have access to such funds since research funding is tied to novelty rather than deployment. NGOs get funding to deploy and scale well tested solutions but do not receive funding for exploring new solutions. Impact funding agencies usually depend on responses to their CFPs and do not have visibility to emerging solutions in this space.

The intended role of RICs with respect to the other elements of a conference like COMPASS is captured in the following figure.

RIC Structure, Eligibility, Agenda, and the process

  1. An RIC is formed by a group of individuals from at least three of the six stakeholders that are key to sustained societal impact: academia, industry (including startups), NGOs, social enterprises, government agencies, impact funding agencies (government/private). We encourage anyone, including researchers having funds and seeking partnerships to directly propose a RIC.
  2. An intent to form an RIC is to be submitted in the to be attached Form 1 by February 15, 2024 February 25, 2024.
  3. All the above submissions will be consolidated in a website open to all those who submitted the above form. The intent is that participants will reach out, discuss, and coalesce into larger groups with a shared, possibly broader, mission and agenda. The Core Committee for RICs will also reach out and help in the matchmaking process. The membership and scope of submitted RIC proposals will evolve and will be reflected in the website. Any changes in the composition of the RICs and revised agenda is to be submitted by March 1st 2024.
  4. By March 15th, proposals that have reached a critical mass of collaborators will be invited by the RIC committee to submit a final agenda document to be presented at COMPASS 2024. This RIC agenda document must be submitted by April 15th. Depending on the stage of maturity of the proposed work, this agenda document could be a whitepaper or a status report with expected plan of action, or a vision document, with the active members of each collaborating organization listed as authors. The agenda documents of all the invited RICs will be published as a collection and made available to all the registered attendees of COMPASS 2024.
  5. At the COMPASS Conclave, each RIC will have a 90-minute/2-hour/half-day workshop session for all participants to engage, plan and create action plans for the following year. The lead proposer of the RIC is responsible for structuring this session. Conference attendees who are not members of any RIC are also invited to attend these sessions and join the team if they find a match. The workshop will flush out the agenda and define an action plan for the upcoming year. This includes division of responsibilities, action plans, funding, etc.

Core Committee for RIC

  • Manohar Swaminathan (Microsoft Research)
  • Bill Thies (Everwell)
  • Doug Schuler (Public Sphere Project and Evergreen State College)
  • Apurv Mehra (BlendNet)
  • Krishnan Narayanan (Itihaasa Research and Digital)
  • Aneesha Singh (University College London)
  • Kurtis Heimerl (University of Washington)
  • Aaditeshwar Seth (IIT Delhi, Co-Chair COMPASS 2024)

Important Dates 

  • Initial RIC proposal submission: February 15th, 2024  February 25th, 2024
  • Consolidation of RICs: March 1st, 2024
  • Invitation to selected RICs to submit Agenda: March 15th 2024
  • Submission of Agenda Document: April 15th, 2024

Registration

To register for the RIC, please fill the Google Form by clicking here.

You can refer to this RIC_draft_example content.