Abstract
This chapter summarizes the earlier chapters. It also provides a discussion of a number of more general issues: the organizational capability of NSF to deal with deeply embedded social and cultural issues; how politics and the built environment have affected bottom-up and top-down initiatives related to broadening participation in computing; the impact of labor practices and funding models on the effectiveness of broadening participation programs; questions about where broadening participation programs should reside in NSF, the tensions between funding research and funding implementations, and differences in understanding of computer scientists and social scientists in carrying out these programs; the implications of adopting a pipeline metaphor; and topics not covered.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, Norberg et al. (1996) regarding DARPA’s early work in information technology research and development.
- 2.
- 3.
There are of course many people working together at NSF, plus thousands of project personnel spread across the United States, that make these things happen. One notable person who worked behind the scenes to make the IT Workforce program and the Broadening Participation in Computing program succeed was Deborah Crawford . As a long-time NSF employee, she knew how to work with budgets, people, and organizational structures inside NSF to make things happen in ways that Cuny and Freeman, as newcomers to NSF did not know how to achieve. Also important was the support of NSF Deputy Director Joseph Bordogna .
Peter Freeman was not the only CISE AD with a strong interest in broadening participation. Notable among the earlier ADs were William Wulf , who continued to support these goals after he left NSF and became president of the National Academy of Engineering, and Nico Habermann , whose influence was cut short by an early death. (We do not have historical perspective to judge some of the recent CISE AD’s commitments to and accomplishments in broadening participation.)
- 4.
Freeman and Aspray (1999) did some mapping of degree programs, but this situation has no doubt changed significantly in the past 15 years.
- 5.
Steve McLaughlin, a doctoral student in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin , has begun research on this topic of the history of informal approaches to computing but there are no publications from the research as of yet.
- 6.
The iconic embodiment of the pipeline metaphor is Camp (1997). As we saw in Chap. 2, CEOSE abandoned the pipeline metaphor in favor of a multiple pathways metaphor in 2004. Other scholars have been critical of the pipeline metaphor for various reasons. See, for example, Jesse (2006) a nd Guzdial (2015). Miller and Wai (2015) argue that for science overall, the leaky pipeline does not leak more women than men. The Computing Research Association study of the IT wor kforce (Freeman and Aspray 1999) was careful to point to informal as well as formal pathways to an IT education.
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Aspray, W. (2016). Conclusions. In: Participation in Computing. History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24832-5_6
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