Welcome
Broader Impacts — Sustainability, Return on Investment, and Community Impact: Building on the success of the inaugural Broader Impacts Infrastructure Summit
held at the University of Missouri in 2013, more than 120 members of the national broader impacts community met in Arlington, Virginia April 16-18, 2014 to share promising practices, to discuss the future of the national broader impacts community, and, most importantly, to dialogue about the future
of broader impacts.
BIIS Preliminary Report 2014
The Summit had three goals
- Increase collaboration among broader impacts professionals
- Enhance broader impacts scholarship
- Influence policy regarding broader impacts
During the Summit, participants were encouraged to document discussions, and several themes emerged:
- A call for systematic training for NSF panel reviewers on broader impacts
- A need for a national organization for broader impacts professionals
- A consensus that institutional support for centralized broader impacts offices is critical to successfully implementing the broader impacts criterion
- A need to share promising practices
- A need for increased scholarship on broader impacts
- A need for NSF to take the lead in messaging about the importance of broader impacts and its longevity as a merit review criterion
- The role of centralized infrastructure at the institutional level in the evaluation and reporting of broader impacts activities in the aggregate
