Application Guidelines

For your project to be considered for funding, you must submit a Statement of Intent (on the next page) describing your project by Monday, April 3rd, 2017 at 5 PM. This statement does not need to have concrete details, but it should give HESAC enough information to have a basic understanding of your idea. Be sure to address how your project satisfies the three overarching criteria (Inclusive, Impactful, and Inventive) in your statement. You may use the following questions as a template when writing your Statement of Intent:

• Paragraph 1: Describe your project

• What is your project (broad overview of what you are doing)?
• What are the outcomes you hope to achieve?
   

• Paragraph 2: Address how the project satisfies the three overarching criteria (Inclusive, Impactful, and Inventive)

• How can your project be inclusive and allow every Husky to participate, interact, or contribute?
• What impact will your project make on campus and how will it enhance the Husky Experience?
• How is it inventive and unique? What is the unaddressed issue or need the project aims to solve?
   

• Paragraph 3: Provide basic logistics

• Do you have an estimated group size for your project?

• If you have other members already chosen, you may name them here. However, you are allowed to change your projects roster up until the final interview with HESAC.

• What is the estimated cost of your project? Please provide rough justifications.

• This can be a single number or a range; it is just an estimate for HESAC to gauge the project’s scale.

• How long do you anticipate your project will take?
• Explain any logistics of the project that you will need the HESAC to help with.
• Name at least one UW faculty or staff mentor
   

• Paragraph 4: Discuss sustainability and conclusion

• Briefly describe your thoughts on the sustainability of your project. Add any concluding remarks you would like us to consider when making our decision.

Please keep the text of your Statement of Intent to 1-2 pages, single-spaced. We recommend that you type your proposal on a Word document and then paste it into the application submission form on the following page. This allows you to check for spelling and grammar issues and keep your proposal within the required limit. However, specific formatting will not be preserved in the Catalyst textbox. Remember to be thoughtful, professional, and concise. If you have any questions about the application process or acceptable proposals, feel free to email the HESAC at seedfund@uw.edu.

Next Steps: There are two steps to the application process. The submission of your Statement of Intent on the next page fulfills the first part of the application. If your project is selected to move forward to the second (final) round, you will be notified by Thursday, April 13th, 2017 at 5 PM. The second round involves a presentation and interview with HESAC. If your project advances to the second round, HESAC will provide details regarding additional documentation, requirements, and expectations.

UW OpenSidewalks: Preparing to host the Special Olympics and building community awareness

Seattle will host the next Special Olympics USA Games in July, 2018. The massive event is estimated to attract 60,000 visitors from across the country and will be the biggest sports event in Seattle since the 1990 Goodwill Games. The majority of events will take place on our campus, and UW will serve as a home-base for the activities. The hosting announcement made in May, 2016 prompted the mayor’s office to consider transportation accommodations for the visitors that the event will draw. However, once visitors are on our campus, they are formally under the university’s jurisdiction. The university is therefore expected to support the events by way of providing a physical plant (including accessible buildings, sidewalks, other infrastructure), accessibility information about navigating the campus (getting from point A to B, both outdoors as well as indoors), and a welcoming community ensuring that the delegations and spectators alike are provided the best possible opportunity to visit our campus in a safe, accessible and comfortable manner. The goal of this project is to bring our community of faculty, staff and students together to fulfill the UW’s commitment to equal access in our physical campus and simultaneously both raise awareness in the community to the challenges experienced by UW students with disabilities and build an information technology rich data resource that will serve the UW community for many years to come. The specific information gap we wish to address is the lack of rich accessibility information about the pedestrian environment and indoors environments that would enable automated routing and navigation on the UW campus. The proposed UW Open Sidewalks project will gather rich data pertaining to the footpaths and indoor paths throughout the UW Seattle Campus. The data set will be imported to an internationally reknown open, shared mapping database (OpenStreetMap) to be used by downstream applications like the UW’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology AccessMap which offers customizable routing to people with different abilities. Currently, no such digital, aggregated, easily modifiable, & scalable data resource exists that collects information about (1) wheelchair accessibility (2) lighting (3) curb ramps (4) stairways (5) elevators (6) noise level (for sensory and visually impaired individuals) (7) resting spots (8) rain covered pathways (9) path surface type (10) path conditions (11) accessible bathroom facilities (12) Signaled crossings (13) sidewalk shoring (providing heading information for visually impaired people).

The Taskar Center for Accessible Technology and the UW eScience Institute jointly funded a project last summer to create the data standard to describe such rich data and had it accepted by the OpenStreetMap community during the OpenStreetMap US Conference. Since then, the Taskar Center has gone further to build tools to enable crowdsourcing of the information, and has so far organized two mapathons collecting a subset of the information described above and demonstrating feasibility of the approach. The effort we hope to fund here will leverage what has already been built and go further by (1) adding to the suite of tools (2) organizing mapping-for-diversity workshops that raise awareness about barriers that our physical environment poses to diverse individuals and (3) running community challenges engaging teams throughout the greater UW Seattle community to gather information about their living, study and work environments. We have tested our current tools with a heterogeneous population and firmly believe that our tools are simple and accessible to allow contribution from every Husky who wishes to participate. Through this project, we hope to promote friendly challenges that will incentivize students, faculty and staff to collect a wealth of information about their buildings and outdoors environments. The end result will not only promote greater awareness and benefit the visitors we anticipate for the 2018 games. Having such a rich campus dataset will greatly enhance current resources and facilitate modification and scalability which is presently impossible with UW-held data.

The Taskar Center for Accessible Technology has been examining the accessibility mapping resources currently available around campus. The best currently available UW-accessibility-map is a 2014 wheelchair access map in pdf form. It contains densely packed information about wheelchair access along on-campus paths and the accessible building entrances (though no information within the buildings themselves). The problem with pdf maps in a fast-changing environment like our UW Seattle campus is that they become stale as soon as they are published, and that updating them is laborious, hard and costly. Moreover, a static map does not offer routing options- so each person must determine what the best route for her would be. Furthermore, the pdf map only addresses the needs of people with mobility impairment, but doesn’t contain information that would accommodate the informational needs of people with sensory, vision, or cognitive impairments. To our knowledge, this will be the first campus to produce such detailed information in digital form, and definitely the first to result in an open, shared data environment that would allow for further modification and use even once our project is over. This has the potential to enhance the Husky Experience not only for the teams having fun collecting data, but for our diverse community of students for generations to come.  

Logistics

• We currently have a Vertically Integrated Projects team that includes 2 key student personnel and 10 fairly active undergraduate participants. This is the group that would continue building the tools and organize the mapping-for-diversity workshop. We are happy to expand the number of students engaged in this effort. The active students are Nick Bolten (EE PhD student) and Jessica Hamilton (Landscape Architecture Masters student).
• The estimated cost for this project is $5000. We anticipate that tool building will continue to take place under the Vertically Integrated Projects mechanism through Spring ‘17 and Autumn ‘17 quarters and will not be included in this budget. The collection and workshop phase will take place in Winter and early Spring 2018. In that latter 2-quarter phase, we will need to employ one hourly paid student to act as administrator for the workshops and arbitrate the gamified collection. The Taskar Center for Accessible Technology is willing to be responsible for the hourly wage costs (estimated $2800) if this Husky Seed Grant is accepted. The requested $5000 will go towards: (1) Equipment: Assuming each mapping-for-diversity workshop holds up to 45 participants in teams of three, we would need 15 blue-tooth GPS location devices ($100 each) and 15 GPS&gyroscope enabled mobile devices ($150 each) (equipment, $3750). (2) Competition: Through the collection and workshop phase we anticipate five workshop/competition engagements at $250 per engagement ($1250)
• The sponsoring UW staff is Anat Caspi, PhD; Director of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Sustainability

UW OpenSidewalks promotes equity at UW by making pedestrian routes and building information open and shared. Through contributions to an existing open data transportation network, the many downstream applications that take OpenStreetMap data and deliver that information to pedestrians will facilitate access to our campus and demonstrate our commitment to an inclusive, diverse community. Collecting this information will support a variety of use cases and downstream activities, including addressing the informational gap for pedestrian of all abilities, automated trip planning customized to individual abilities, and furnishing rich tools for Huskies and the UW administration alike to continue and update the data as our campus grows and develops. Access to safe pedestrian routes is a critical challenge if we are to steward a healthy, inclusive and resilient UW campus community.