Brainstorming/Action Planning Summary
A4RC Alliance Meeting
October 17, 2007
Participants: Aftab Ahmad*, Bobby Schnabel*, Byong Lee, Dennis Kafura, George
Harrison*, Gerry Dozier, Kelvin Bryant, Lecia Barker, Liz Jessup, Loretta Johnson, Mahmoud
Manzoul, Marlow Hinton, Maureen Biggers, Michael Smith*, Scott McCrickard, Sondra Lancaster
*indicates call-in
Alliance meetings are scheduled to be held via conference call at 4:00pm ET,
the last Wednesday of each month. Next call date is October 31.
Here is the result of our initial mind mapping process as we started the day.
Following the diagram, are the brainstormed ideas/issues/suggestions for each of
the top priority planning areas identified by the group during the meeting.
Yellow highlights designate our list of top action items and the list of Alliance
members who will continue to work on that specific area.
A4RC Alliance "Alliance for Advancing
African-American Researchers in
Computing"
 Focus Area 1: Communication
o Internal
 Conference calls at least once/month
 Asynchronous- repository for documents (wiki) (recycling);
emailing-listserv. Monthly reminders, news (student activity
and writing proposals)
 Concerning students- promote alliance
 Marketing- flyers, postcards, pencils, t-shirts, student
recruitment,
 press releases (local and national PR), including
student projects
o Who is the staff for PR?
 Project manager/faculty visit each campus once/semester
 Faculty clusters by research interest
 Research articles/posters- relevant conferences
 Student presentations/competitions
 Target HPC/HPL to get people used to our presence
 Faculty go with students, “bottle” info for student
orientations
 Links to other alliances- create mechanisms that share
resources through participation in other alliance meetingsone person from others of to meetings- and leverage others;
work in ours
 Newsletter? All BPCs? Ask for supplement)
o External
 Website
 News, student activities, events
 Host at NCA+T, professional design, maintenance by
UNCFSP
 Possibly edit capacity
 Web casts
 Chat, limit # participants by others can lurk
 SPLASH! Kickoff, simulcast to all campus
 youTube
 Facebook- but draw them back to our website
 Logo

Communication (next steps)
o Set up international communication plan (include everything)
 Maureen/Gerry
o Website development/update (contact management)
 Sondra
o Student recruitment (strategic plan)
 < message  various levels
 Undergrad- grad- faculty careers
 Facebook, youtube, myspace
 Conference participation/presentations
o External communication
 Recruitment
 Website
 Conference participation/presentations
 Informational web casts
 SPLASH kickoff-simulcast
 Maureen
 Communication Action Items:
TEAM MEMBERS: Sondra/Lecia/Kelvin/Scott/Gerry/Maureen
o Internal communication (Maureen/Gerry)
 List serve- create
 Set-up routine telephone calls for Alliance
 Monthly reminders of news (activity ideas, etc.)
o Website
 Discuss options with company webmaster (Sondra)
 Develop content/categories for site
 Ex. Undergrad, grad, conferences
o SPLASH kickoff (Maureen)
 Develop concept
o Recruitment strategy (Scott, Kelvin, Lecia, Sondra)
 Focus Area 2: Faculty Experience
o Availability of faculty to work with students/other faculty on both
sides
o Rules of engagement, common credit, guidelines
o Understand benefits (R1 and HCBUs)=> resources
o Look at research clusters within schools and with alliance men
o Special Sab. To allow HCBU faculty to spend time with R1
o Corporate sponsorship to help with money
o Also R1 going to HBCU’s
o Level of collaboration within research areas
o Understanding cultures (e.g. admin policies/procedures)
o Postdocs and PhD collaboration

Faculty Partnerships
o Faculty buy-in and expectations
 Requires communication
 Reward structure
 Consider non-tenured
o Seed proposal/initiatives funding and expertise and other resources
o Group meetings in conjunction with conferences
o Curriculum dev. Across institution
o Writing joint proposals
o Sharing bet practices
o Preparing materials and alliance schools
 Faculty Action Items:
TEAM MEMBERS: Kelvin/Dennis/Liz/Byong/George
o Other ‘cells’ at other HCBUs
 Formalize faculty research relationships- how?
 Consider ‘partial cells’ @ Jackson State
 Faculty visitation cluster before Jan 2008- $?
 Topic (research needs to start in research class)
 Contact points at each R1 to facilitate matches/connections
 Deadline for connections 11/?/07

CD1 insufficient- need virtual meeting about research
to brainstorm new ideas- more $
 Spring/summer/fall foals
 Est. expectations for “cells”
o How to build the alliance?
 Brainstormed title: A4RC (Alliance for Advancing AfricanAmerican Researchers in Computing)
o Define milestones/timeline
 Measurements for success
 Venue for communication
 How can we leverage other alliances?
 Focus Area 3: Student Experience
TEAM MEMBERS: Gerry/Loretta/Maureen/Marlow/Kelvin
o How do we…
 Mentor
 Get them
 Keep them
 Spark the passion
 Capture interest
 Identify interest
 Build student teams
 Create relevant curriculum
 Create attractive into programs
 Introduce roles early on in intro classes
 Push the relevancy/impact/importance/benefits of research
and CS overall?
 Set them to continue on after REUs
 Toward applying to grad school
 Attending conferences
o Have meeting of curriculum committees
o Develop alliance-wide student survey of interests
o Alliance Facebook!!!!
o Encourage involvement in student orgs
o Alliance fellowships for PhD study
 Get industry sponsorship
o How do we bring FUN to the curriculum?
 Look at Best practices
o iMovie competition for developing alliance
 research movies
 place Alliance movies on youTube
o REU Summer (August) conference
o Alliance-wide research
 Distance Courses over the Alliance (undergrad and grad)
o Course in the
 Spring 2008-Pilot
 Fall 2008 everyone
o Alliance-wide technical courses
o Model for undergrad research:
 Fall ’07 recruit students for 1 year long research
 JSU $750/mo for 9 months
 Spring ’08 students work with faculty member at HBCU
(directly) and RU (indirectly)
 Summer ’08 REUs at R1 partner institution to continue
research
 HBCU faculty visit twice
o Midterm REU
 Final REU
 August REU Research Conference participation
 Fall ’08 students come back and focus on paper generation
and submit to conferences