NSF's flagship Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) program was launched in 2016 to support research advances in technological and social dimensions with meaningful community engagement and collaboration. The S&CC program has now reached a point where a virtual organization (VO) is essential to further catalyze the rapid evolution of this new cross-disciplinary field. The central goal of this project is to accelerate convergence of diverse disciplines in the smart and connected communities domain through the creation of a new S&CC-VO. The S&CC-VO will (i) facilitate and foster interaction and exchanges among S&CC principal investigators and their teams, including community partners; (ii) enable sharing of artifacts and knowledge generated by S&CC projects with the broader scientific and non-academic communities such as local community stakeholders; and (iii) facilitate and foster collaboration and information exchange between S&CC researchers, community stakeholders, and others.

The S&CC-VO will advance knowledge and learning in the S&CC field through partnerships spanning academia, government, industry, and especially, community organizations. The project will create and maintain a web-based repository and collaborative platform to facilitate the exploration and open exchange of research results, tools, datasets and educational materials among S&CC researchers, stakeholders, and the broader community. To increase access to discoveries, the virtual organization will allow curating content with shared taxonomies so critical data, tools, and discoveries can be found from traditionally separated domains. Active resources will allow easy access to explore datasets, toolchains, and research artifacts for experts and non-experts alike. Actionable information will be made accessible by building out features in a configurable, as-needed basis, by moderating content, and by ultimately keeping the VO as an impactful community driven organization subject to community evaluation, feedback, and review. Outreach activities for academic, government, industry, non-profits, and other stakeholders will be facilitated within the S&CC-VO and through community engagement sessions. The S&CC Community Forum at the annual S&CC PI Meeting, and CPS-IoT Week further create opportunities for matchmaking and mechanisms for engagement along both technological and social dimensions. The S&CC-VO will become a highly effective tool for broadening participation of diverse and vulnerable communities, grass-roots organizations, and volunteer groups in research programs. Opening up and enabling access to research topics, teaming opportunities, datasets, toolchains, and other research artifacts eliminates the high threshold to entering the research field, improves equity by open access, and enables the formation of competitive projects in areas that need S&CC results the most.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.