[NSF’S OKN INNOVATION SPRINT]

OKN Innovation Sprint

The National Science Foundation and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy are reaching out to inform you of an “OKN Innovation Sprint” to lay the foundation for an Open Knowledge Network (OKN). As you appreciate, a knowledge network is a powerful way to connect, organize, and access disparate data and information resources and has the potential to dramatically enhance AI tools that use those information resources.

Given your tremendous expertise and ongoing work connecting data to create knowledge, we’d like to invite you to participate in the sprint process, joining other stakeholders from government, academia, industry, non-profits, and other communities.

The goal is to develop a roadmap for broader application of knowledge graphs to US government and public-sector challenges.

Funding is not being provided to the OKN Innovation Sprint activity itself. NSF, and potentially other agencies, will use the outputs of the Innovation Sprint and the June workshop to consider the need for additional investments to realize the benefits of a “proto-OKN.”

The OKN Innovation Sprint is an invitation-only event to facilitate fruitful discussions and impactful outcomes. If you are interested and able to participate (even in only some of the Sprint activities).

Participation

Participation would involve a virtual Kick-Off Workshop Feb. 23-25, 2022, which will be used to refine and select sprint “projects” and teams based on identified government use-cases that are in the American public’s interest.  A series of ~4 short (~90 min) virtual sprint workshops will be held from March – May 2022 in which you could participate by sharing your time, expertise, and insights to help scope the design needs and identify challenges and opportunities for an OKN applied to that use case.

The Sprint effort will close with a virtual Proto-OKN Design Workshop, scheduled for June 8 & 9, 2022, to bring together all the sprint participants and teams to share their use-case based designs and discuss how they could be integrated into a proto-OKN. If you are interested in participating but not able to attend the Kick-off Workshop, we would still welcome your participation in a sprint effort and/or the final Proto-OKN Design Workshop.

If you have questions about the Sprint, please email OKN@nsf.gov. You can also join the KGC Slack channel #okn-innovation-sprint to discuss the sprint, build teams and coordinate efforts. An invitation to the KGC Slack workspace is available here.

If you would like to discuss further, please share your availability between Jan. 7 and Feb. 4, 2022.

Please feel free to share this message with other colleagues who could contribute valuable expertise.