Last Monday, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) – together with the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Government Affairs Committee – ran its first-ever Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI). Thirty-five computing researchers from around the country came to Washington to learn about U.S. science policy. Here, one of the participants — Peter Stone, an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin — shares his experiences in the daylong workshop.

Scientists and politicians comprise two very different, usually mutually independent cultures.  The analytical mindset that is central to the scientific process is not as pervasive in politics, where compromise and deal-making rule the day. As a result, scientists are often reluctant to engage in the political realm.  But this reluctance can be very detrimental to the scientific community.

On Monday, November 7th, the Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI) was held as an effort to energize mid-career computer science researchers to play a role in influencing science policy. Sponsored by the Computing Research Association (CRA) and Computing Community Consortium (CCC), it was a one-day meeting of 35 computer science professors from universities around the country and a few researchers from industrial research labs.  We met on the 11th floor of the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill.

An esteemed group of speakers was brought in to first motivate us to become involved in science policy, and second to teach us how to do so.

As Fred Schneider, CCC Council member and Chair of CRA’s Government Affairs Committee, told us in the first talk, and as we learned in detail throughout the day, government is complicated. In his words, if what we learned in school about the three branches was Government 101, then this was Government 601. We learned about congressional committees, agencies, budgets, staffers, lobbyists, and all of the other relevant people and organizations, as well as how they relate to one another (more after the jump…).

» Read more: First Person: “Science is Only One Part of Policymaking”

On Monday, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) – together with the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Government Affairs Committee – ran its first-ever Leadership in Science Policy Institute (LiSPI). Thirty-five computing researchers from around the country came to Washington to learn about U.S. science policy. Here, one of the participants – Beki Grinter, an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech — shares her experiences in the daylong workshop.

This past Monday I participated in the first CCC/CRA Leadership in Science Policy Institute in Washington, DC. The day was broken out into different sessions focused on how the Federal budgeting process works, how to connect to agencies like the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and the more familiar to many National Science Foundation (and how they are all very different from each other!), and so on. We also had time to craft and practice interactions we might have with Congressional staffers and what Congressional testimony looks like. Each of these warrants at least one blog post in its own right (if not more). In the rest of this post I would like to share some of the other things I learned at the workshop (after the jump…).

» Read more: First Person: “In Washington the National is Local”