The Opportunity Incubator: a professional development prototype
I've been working on a project called The Opportunity Incubator with my colleague Talia Perry. We're wrapping up our prototype and are ready to start gathering feedback from our library faculty and staff. From there we will iterate over the summer and launch a 1.0 version this fall.
I've often heard from people seeking better ways to identify journals where they could publish, conferences where they could present, and funding sources for their projects, research, and professional interests. I refer to those three aspects as "opportunities," hence the need for an “incubator” to collect, store and nurture the possibilities. A toolkit came together. Here's the high-level view:
Essentially, we (all props to Talia for the tech infrastructure!) built a Google Spreadsheet that holds information related to publications, conferences, and funding. This becomes a central hub that allows us to contextually push the content to different channels. Here is the high-level schematic:
Outputs
One of these outputs is a Google Calendar. For example, someone can subscribe to the "grants" calendar, toggle it on/off, and it displays any active current funding opportunities. This helps us know what's open right now (or coming soon) and when it closes. The “conferences” calendar displays proposal deadlines as well as conference dates.
This view allows me to see everything in one place, a week at a time:
We also have a webpage that includes a monthly view:
The web page also provides a detailed list of all the various opportunities that we're monitoring, complete with a countdown. How many days until a grant application is due?
Or how many days until a particular conference proposal is due?
Right now, we have 50 publications, 100 conferences, and 35 funding agencies in the database. And since we had all this information, I also decided to offer it as a chatbot too. I'm using GPT-4 for the prototype, but will likely migrate it over to Gemini this summer. This provides a good user experience. I can explore and ask questions about publications, talks, and funding.
Future Aspirations
We are planning to connect other related content as well. For example, details about travel policies or hiring student assistants. In terms of sponsored projects, we want to embed information about our operational timelines and business processes, workflows related to foundation relations, tips, advice, cost analysis, forms, project management templates, lessons learned, samples for past applications, digital infrastructure details, and essentially all of our grant-seeking support meshed together in a highly contextual package.
Down the road, I also want to incorporate training and other professional development opportunities. For example, there are a number of our librarians and staff who demonstrate leadership potential, so it would be great to use this tool to help outline various pathways. We also want to curate works in progress, such as active grants within the library, frame any collaboration opportunities and other team-forming efforts, add calls for chapters, national service, professional committees, projects, and potentially match people with various opportunities. But right now, we just want to get the 1.0 version live for the fall.
Shoutout again to Talia for her scripting and for bootstrapping this startup effort with me. And thanks to the CMU Library faculty for their ambition and pragmatic questions.
see also: doing transformative stuff
