Metro21 Announces Results of NSF Project

Metro21 is excited to announce the results of its National Science Foundation (NSF) funded project, ”Enabling and Sustaining Connected Communities Rooted in Solving Societal Challenges.”  This project consisted of a series of listening sessions followed by a two-day in-person workshop to elicit feedback and suggestions from experts in academia, government, nonprofits, civic organizations, and industry to identify solutions to the significant technical, policy, and socioeconomic challenges to integration and scaling of connected communities technologies. 

The executive summary provides a high-level overview of the project findings, which focused on the critical roles that national funders, academia and local governments play in three categories: Putting Communities in the Lead; Sustaining Innovations; and Integrating and Scaling Successful Technologies in New Communities. The full report provides an in-depth look at the pre-workshop sessions, the findings from the in-person workshop, as well as more detailed observations and suggestions.   

Metro21 will be sharing and discussing the findings of the project at the 2023 MetroLab Summit in Portland Oregon in a roundtable discussion on June 27. We are extremely grateful to NSF for funding this project and look forward to discussing these critical issues in the future. Please reach out to Karen Lightman for more information and/or to provide feedback.