Project Portal toolkit

Introduction

This module provides a toolkit for creating and managing a Project Portal. There is also a Project Portal Initiative you may be eligible to join, which will provide your government with either paid or pro bono support to launch a Portal, together with a cohort of other local and state governments.

What is a Project Portal?

A Project Portal is an online platform - with associated processes - to help researchers and practitioners identify each other for purposes of: (a) sharing information and (b) potentially partnering on an applied research project. As you read below, open the San Antonio Project Portal and North Carolina Project Portal, so you can see an example - it'll help make it concrete what we're talking about.

Why a Project Portal?

Government has many questions that could be answered with the help of researchers based at other agencies or institutions; and many researchers would (for various reasons) be willing to partner. A core challenge, however, is identifying and matching and incentivizing the people, at the right times and in the right ways, to actually partner on a project. Often researchers are unfamiliar with what a government is grappling with or what assistance would be helpful. And likewise governments are often unfamiliar with which researchers may be helpful and in what ways. Even when people are generally aware of partnership possibilities, it may be too cumbersome to advertise, find, and vet specific partnership options.

Many parts of the process need to go right for a partnership to start and flourish. This concept note focuses on one part: helping academics and government practitioners identify each other, in relation to a particular project need. The essential idea is to create a centralized website—curated and advertised by state government—where open project opportunities could be posted, and in turn where researchers (via user accounts) could peruse the opportunities and signal when they would like to be considered as a potential partner.

A Portal Designed for Government Ownership

Many people have tried to solve this match-making problem. Universities and think tanks regularly post a searchable inventory of faculty (e.g. Brown, NCSU, Pew, Brookings, Urban). Universities have government affairs and external relations offices. A few entities have built online portals aiming to do exactly what I am pitching. Research4Impact, for example, piloted a portal (now decommissioned). Does the world really need another damn website?

My diagnosis is that these prior portal attempts have limited success for the fundamental reason that they were not owned by the government.

The emphasis on designing for government ownership is critical because of an asymmetry: there is one state government, but there are dozens if not hundreds of universities in a state. The upshot is that government employees are never going to bother uploading their projects over and over again into dozens and dozens of separate systems, each of which typically has different formats and requirements and only limited odds of leading to a partner match. A government, in contrast, can hold a monopoly: it can create the single place for curating a list of their projects, and it can use its centralized power to set standards on information entry.

The government ownership approach is easier still if the portal is linked with existing administrative flows. Existing protocols for posting requests for proposals, for example, or requirements to post contract, employment, and internship opportunities, could be piped into the portal. From this perspective, a government employee can write up their opportunity once, to satisfy both procurement or contract rules and have it shipped for posting inside the portal. And note how if the portal has some fraction of opportunities that are funded, then that’ll help pull eyeballs to the site (including to those opportunities that happen to be pro bono).

Can a website really accomplish all of that?

The internet is littered with websites suffering the conceit that, if you build something sexy online, that will magically attract eyeballs and people will use it. Let me say explicitly and firmly and loudly and near aggressively that a website, no matter how well designed, cannot spark and maintain partnerships on its own. A tremendous amount of back-end legwork is required to curate the list of project descriptions and to manage exploratory conversations about those projects.

So no, a website can't really accomplish all of that. But that's not what we're talking about. The Project Portal is a concept that is anchored on the website but, fundamentally, it is about much more than the website per se: it is the routines and mentalities for how to ask good questions, refine those questions in the open, set up research teams, and ultimately manage those teams toward the generation of research insights. To those ends you'll below a variety of tools such as a template guiding the identification of a trackable questions, tips for how to search for potential partners, a flow chart of how the portal process might be managed, and so forth.

There is also a draft memo recently written for a state that is considering launching a portal by way of joining The Project Portal Initiative. If you're interested, and want more details about the technical details, tiers of support, and cost, check that out and image it's written to you.

What are the aims of the website, as a website?

Overall the Project Portal website per se is about doing four things:

1. Creating a single place where all project opportunities can be easily perused.
2. Empowering ability to easily advertise that single place (e.g. in an interview or event say, “visit partnerships.nc.gov to learn more”).
3. Streamlining the in-take of expressions of interest. When a user clicks that action button, it pipes into a centralized database where we can track everything. No need for email inbox chaos.
4. Sprinkling some sexy magic dust, so that it feels - not like a B league hodgepodge of PDFs - but that this portal is an A league “thing” of elegance.

More about that #4. I’m not trying to be mystical. I simply mean that, in today’s world, many people (for better and worse) gauge how evolved a project is by the immediate impression they get from the project's website. If the website feels elegant, it supports an intuitive inference that the project is elegant too. An elegant layout also entices exploration of the page. To that end, the website should feel beautiful. . .

The Portal Should be Simple and Feel Beautiful

My intuition is that less will be more here. A few core pieces of content beautifully presented will leave a stronger impression on the user than a website crowded with information. I want a person to hit the splash page, feel a flash of “wow cool,” and then poke around; if they see a project they’re curious about, they click a button to follow whatever is the action step for the project.

So for example check out this website: https://startsmall.llc/. Not much to it. Notice the project title, date, abstract, simple tag for domain, and dollar amount. That’s it. If you click on a project, you’re taken to its unique page, the design of which could be anything. It’s simple. The content seems to be literally stored in a Google Sheet. The key is getting the content right.

What might be the range of action steps, for folks interested in a posted Project?

There are any number of action steps I could imagine:

1. Mer1ely indicate you are interested, so we get a list of interested people we may contact with additional information.
2. Sign up for a meeting. For example, perhaps a project description notes the next step is an information meeting on June 15th; the action step could be RSVPing for that event.
3. Email a person. Perhaps an agency wants folks to just email Suzy or Jamal. Fine. Click and your email pops up with Suzy’s email in TO: field.
4. Fill out an interest form.
5. Respond to a RFI or RFP. If an agency has an already posted a request for information (RFI) or proposals (RFP), the link could simply direct to that page of additional instructions. To be clear, I am not saying these systems are actually integrated; rather, the entry into the portal is curated by hand, but the link for more information can just direct to the URL on the procurement page.

How can I join the Project Portal Initiative?

Email contact@thelabmanual.org, with a few sentences about your position inside government and potential resources for a portal (or known lack of resources) - check out the Memo: Technical and cost options for a project portal - and we can set up a time to talk.