Reflections on the 2024 Summit
Starting strong on October 1st, MetroLab hosted its 7th annual summit at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington, DC. For the first time in our history, we hosted the summit at a library — DC’s central library home of the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. The theme for this year’s summit focused on an R&D Agenda in the Service of Cities — or how local governments consider research as an asset, and how this can move forward step by step with the university community and community partners during this time of innovation and economic investment.
Our summit kicked off with a conversation with Mayor Levar Stoney of Richmond, VA. Mayor Stoney reminded us that our city’s complex problems should bring a sense of urgency from the research community. As moderator and MetroLab board member Katharine Lusk asked him, what keeps you up at night? What are some of the pressing needs that are top of mind? Mayor Stoney underscored that it is up to us to take on hard problems, and to not require our children to inherit problems that we can solve today.
Mayor Stoney was followed by “The State of the University”, a panel discussion with several university presidents, including: Taylor Eighmy, Ph.D., President, University of Texas at San Antonio; Kathy E. Johnson, Ph.D., President, University of New Orleans; Jonathan Koppell, President, Montclair State University and moderated by Jennifer Keup, Executive Director, Coalition of Urban Serving Universities (USU). The USU is a A president‐led network of public urban research universities working to drive transformational institutional change that supports a set of institutions as they plan and implement groundbreaking reforms to facilitate student success, boost degree completion, and revitalize their communities in the process. They discussed what challenges and opportunities university leadership face, and how we all can coalesce around the important mission of making our communities better. We will provide a more detailed capturing of this important conversation in a subsequent write-up.
The first morning ended with a presentation by Hunter Jones at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration talking about NOAA’s efforts around extreme heat. NOAA has coalesced their work around this effort at www.heat.gov — a web portal that includes resources and funding opportunities for those interested in working on this topic. And you can find more information on the Extreme Heat initiative with the Federation of American Scientists here.
After lunch, we welcomed our attendees back with the State of the Lab — and in our tradition, with a walk-up song. At the State of the Lab, I shared some of the following updates:
- MetroLab wrapped up our GenAI for Local Government In the Lab effort. You can find our white papers on Cybersecurity and Community Engagement guidance on our website soon.
- We launched our new Local Government Research and Development Agenda program, and kicked off our 20 city workshop tour earlier this year with Kansas City, MO. MetroLab is looking to understand the research needs of local governments, as well as more deeply understanding how research is used, procured, and trusted.
- We’ve officially started supporting NSF’s new Civic Innovation Challenge cohort, and have launched a new website that now features a dedicated webpage to each project here.
- We continue to sign up Friends and Partners of MetroLab under our new community model. To date, we have 70 organizations in our MetroLab “friends” ecosystem.
Rounding out the first day, our attendees headed off to our concurrent breakout sessions: The first set of panels included: Kellogg vs Kerslake: the contrasting challenges and possibilities of civic innovation in the US and the UK and Confronting Housing Insecurity with Public-Private Solutions. The Kellogg Commission and Kerslake reports were briefly discussed by the panelists to showcase the relationship between universities and community engagement in the US and UK. It was highlighted that there is a need for the universities to grasp the scholarship of community engagement i.e. co-generation and application of knowledge as opposed to treating it as a service.
During the Confronting Housing Insecurity with Public-Private Solutions, panelists highlighted the experience of local government in Lane County Oregon and provided the opportunity to hear directly from local government administrators regarding their efforts to build more affordable and transitional housing stock in the face of opposition. They reviewed roadblocks (some of them self-built), successes, and best practices applicable to any local community seeking to replicate their success.
Later in the afternoon, our panelists had the option to attend either: The Role of Scientists and Technologists in Local and State Governments or Curb Space Revolution: USDOT SMART Grants & Digital Infrastructure. During the The Role of Scientists and Technologists in Local and State Government panel, we heard from a group of innovative policy advisors (both national and international) who are focused on providing non-partisan scientific & technology policy guidance to state legislatures. They understand that this guidance is too often disjointed from the policy making process, or viewed as only being a part of a select set of issue areas. By providing state legislators with in-house scientific & technological policy advising fellows, these panelists believe that they can provide policy makers with more tools in their tool box, and help improve policy outcomes for all. At the Curb Space Revolution session, the panelists discussed the need for cities to collaborate with each other to contribute to this revolution. It was also pointed out that when the public and private sector work together, there is a two-way sharing of information that leads to a functional city operation. The requirement for good data was also highlighted, particularly to enable the different datasets to interact with each other.
The next morning, we kicked-off the Summit with a presentation by Dr. Varun Chandola on the National Science Foundation and their new National AI Research Resource Pilot and I had a conversation with Gabe Klein, Executive Director of the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation with the U.S. Department of Transportation. Gabe’s office has championed wide ranging successes in establishing the foundation of a national strategy for electric vehicle charging infrastructure. He also underscored how important partnerships are with local governments to deploy charging infrastructure. If you have any questions or requests from his office, start here.
Before heading into our plenary panels, we had the honor of awarding the 2024 Tony Luppino Award to Matthew Zhou, Assistant Chief Data Officer for the State of California. Launched at our Summit last year in Portland Oregon, this award is given once a year to someone for demonstrating exemplary partnership and public policy impact. Matthew’s participation on our GenAI Task Force was so impactful to our efforts. His contribution to the subcommittees and webinars informed local governments and universities across the country, helping shape policy and research. Thank you and congratulations Matt!
The rest of the morning was dedicated to learning more about the State of AI and Libraries. We heard from federal leaders in the U.S. Department of Commerce, National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on what their agencies are doing in regards to artificial intelligence.
“For the vast majority of local governments, tapping into the promise of open data because of capacity and thinking of how AI can take that forward. This era we are in is the next logical step to see what happens for the open data movement.”
We also heard from leaders in the library space on how these public institutions serve their communities. A big thank you to Richard Reyes-Gavilan, Executive Director of Washington DC Public Libraries for joining us as we hosted the summit at the Central Library. As Rich rightly pointed out, “books represent such a sliver of what we provide for our communities.”
Our last afternoon together was an insightful one. We came back from lunch to hear from philanthropic leaders during our Innovation and Philanthropy, Spurring Change in Communities panel. A major take away from this session was that foundations are really looking for action-oriented plans that address what you are trying to solve and how to plan to solve it. And some advice the panel gave:
What do you wish people knew before they come to you with a funding “ask?”
- A brainstorm of ideas that can focus on areas we are trying to solve and then drawing that to an actionable idea. An action oriented plan is key.
- Make the pitch. “This is my idea and how I’m doing it. How much it costs, what it will take, and my plan for after.” And don’t be afraid to ask. Also noted: There’s a lot of drop off after the pitch. Be sure to respond and keep the conversation going.
- So rarely is there a “fail” in which deliverables aren’t completed. Failure in philanthropy looks to whether or not the journey/program actually brought impact.
In the afternoon we heard from two of our inaugural INRIX x MetroLab Challenge teams. The City of South Bend, IN — Notre Dame University team presented on their work with traffic calming measures and the University of Washington presented on their work to calibrate agent-based transportation models like POLARIS across multiple dimensions. MetroLab is grateful for our partnership with INRIX, and will share an update on forthcoming opportunities to participate in an INRIX x MetroLab challenge 2.0 soon.
Finally, we concluded this year’s summit with our Local R&D Agenda Workshop, in which we ultimately ask “if you could get research on anything, what would it be?”. You can find a summary of the workshop in our local government R&D agenda blog series here.
Overall, it was an incredible two days. The MetroLab Summit brought together around 100 people who are committed to improving cities and communities through science and research. A special thanks to those who joined us in DC and we look forward to engaging with you all throughout the year through our programs.
