The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in collaboration with Loyola College, proposes to engage diverse stakeholders to develop an Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group in Broadening Participation (ACM SIGBP) charter, submit a proposal to the ACM to establish a SIGBP, and support startup efforts of the SIGBP community. The SIG will provide a well-recognized, well-established, international community to support and strengthen the diverse array of initiatives for Broadening Participation in Computing (BPC). Broadening participation in computing requires multiple levels of inter-disciplinary collaboration among researchers, practitioners, educators and policy-makers from academia, industry, government, K-12 schools, and the non-profit sector within a variety of interests, including computing, psychology, sociology, ethnic and gender studies, education, and human resources. A plethora of BPC organizations, programs and initiatives exist. Although BPC communities are starting to coalesce, as with the NSF BPC alliances, a majority of initiatives are relatively isolated. The BPC research literature is scattered among journals and conferences within computing education, general education, and the social sciences. What is needed is an overarching BPC community to support and highlight the many existing BPC initiatives, and to drive the national BPC agenda by speaking for the community with one voice. This will provide opportunities for students seeking to participate, practices for practitioners to adopt, and a community for researchers seeking to collaborate. The ACM is the flagship international professional and scientific organization for computing. The ACM Special Interest Groups (SIGs) represent the major areas of computing. Each SIG forms a community that includes conferences, publications, and regional and global activities intended to advance knowledge and foster collaboration within computing areas. We seek to leverage the ACM SIG community structure to support an international BPC Community. The goal of the proposed ACM SIGBP Project is to strengthen, scale, and sustain efforts to broaden participation in computing by establishing an ACM SIGBP. Project outcomes include a) establishing an ACM SIGBP, b) increasing participation in existing BPC activities and organizations, c) increasing awareness among computing students of BPC opportunities, and d) increasing collaboration among existing BPC efforts nationally and internationally.
The primary goal of this project was to create an overarching community for broadening participation in computing (BPC): to support, highlight, strengthen, and coalesce existing BPC communities. In particular, this project aimed to establish a unified BPC community by housing the community within an existing framework and then working to buildup visibility and participation in the community. We originally aimed to leverage the ACM Special Interest Group (SIG) as the framework. However, we have since decided to leverage the IEEE Computer Society (CS) Special Technical Community (STC) as the framework. As work toward the formation of the STC progressed, we expanded our focus to sustain the BCP by working to promote research related to BPC, in part by fostering greater collaboration between the education research and the computing research communities. Project Outcomes An IEEE Computer Society Special Technical Community (STC) has been created on BPC. A website to promote activities has been created at http://stcbp.org. (See primary image.) An initial leadership team defined startup activities, and the first STC co-sponsored conference will take place in summer 2015. With anticipated IEEE Computer Society co-sponsorship, this will become the first BPC-related conference to offer proper digital (scholarly) archival (in IEEE Xplore). The above project outcomes directly address the intellectual merit and broader impacts of the proposed work.
