e-plasma

Oftentimes, highly skilled students and researchers at Universities in Latin America and the Caribbean are not sure about how to reach disadvantaged communities to help solving their most pressing problems. Our main goal is to put both sides in close contact.

The University of Campinas is presently creating a new co-working and maker space space, the Plasma, to gather students and researchers from different fields to develop spontaneous projects, as a new way of learning and developing 21st century skills. Our proposal consists in creating an online platform for connecting academics to the outside community and establishing a problem database. Participants will then be able to choose the challenges they can help solving, using skills and technologies available at the University.

The development of solutions for the real world can help forming more emphatic professionals, diminishing the gap between society and high technologies, and promoting a broader exchange of knowledge.

The specific problems we are tacking are the gap between society and universities and between society and high technology. Researchers have been observing that technological advancement is greater where the relationship between universities and society is stronger. For example, professor Paulo Feldmann, from the School of Economics and Administration of the University of São Paulo, has asserted that  “The distance between colleges and companies prevents the emergence of new technologies” (Sociedade, 45:126, 2012). He also affirms that “the absence of strong integration between universities and other sectors of society also reflects the scientific-technological backwardness not only in Brazil, but in Latin America as a whole”. According to the TIMES University Impact Rankings 2019 by the 8th SDG (decent work and economic growth), only 9 universities among the top 100 are located in Latin America and the Caribbean. Two of them are in the state of São Paulo, but our University is still not among them. This means that universities could do more in promoting “sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all”. The biggest problem we face is an effective means of communication between anyone in the society and university research teams.

The e-plasma platform seeks to serve citizens who are interested in contributing to the resolution of a community problem, but don't have the knowledge, and for people or groups who have the knowledge, but don't have enough structure and staff to put it into practice. For example, research on alternative uses of residues and left-over material. Or public school educators who are trying to carry on projects in their schools, but don’t have the technology and resources to make them viable.The first contact would happen through the e-plasma platform, which would be the vehicle of direct communication between the university and the online community. The intention is to facilitate and direct the contact between the interested parts more efficiently and quickly and to create a database not only with problems, but with potential partnerships. Once the issue is sent, groups of students, researchers and teachers can choose whether to work with it, according to their skills and interests. The intention is to form teams from different areas of activity, as a form of interdisciplinarity, important for the resolution of contemporary situations. Close communication with the community must be part of the development process.

The State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) is increasingly implementing actions to democratize higher education. In addition, it supports  research and attitudes that can help the development of society.

UNICAMP is presently creating a new co-working and maker space, the Plasma, to gather students and researchers from different fields to develop spontaneous projects, as a new way of learning and developing 21st century skills. Our proposal consists in creating an online platform, e-Plasma, for connecting academics to the outside community, through a problem database, where the community can communicate their challenges and the students and professors can choose which ones they can help solving, using skills and technologies available at the University and at the Plasma space.

The Plasma, currently under construction, is a space open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, where all members of the academic community can work together and share computers, 3D printers, laser cutting machines and other high technologies. In addition to being available to university students, it should also offer courses and activities open to the external community. The proposed e-plasma platform, taking advantage of the Plasma space at the University of Campinas, is an invitation to the protagonism of new ideas, interdisciplinary creations, and problem-solving processes, allowing the development of skills such as creativity, autonomy, and empathy towards the outside community. 

The e-plasma platform can be easily used by anyone with internet access, which is a great opportunity to reach disadvantaged communities and work collaboratively with them. With the e-plasma, a specific community can call attention to a pressing problem they are facing, creating a new topic in the platform database that will link them directly to the university. Once the academic community selects a challenge to solve at the problem database and forms a team, based on their interests and skills, they will have all the infrastructure and technology support at the Plasma space to work on their solution.

This proposed problem-solving platform that connects university and outside communities can be used as a prototype and be replicated in many universities in Latin America and the Caribbean, in order to impact the lives of more people and to create connections. The development of solutions for the real world through the platform can help to form more emphatic professionals, diminishing the gap between society and high technologies, and promoting a broader exchange of knowledge.

In order to reach everyone, even the most vulnerable population, the e-plasma platform should not look like an academic platform. It will be designed as a cellular app, with the easiest possible interface, and work similarly to an online dating application, allowing users (problem initiators) to describe their problems and categorize them, anonymously or not. They can do this using audio recordings, videos, images and text. The platform will then allow other people from the same community or from other communities with similar problems to contribute to the problem description, or to simply like it, signaling that they also face similar problems. 

Next, students, professors and researchers (problem solvers) from the University of Campinas (and in the future also from other Universities) who match the needed skills or interests will be invited to act on this problem. Once at least two users have “matched,” they can start exchanging messages and inviting other solvers registered in the platform, to form interdisciplinary teams. They can ask questions to the problem initiators and start working collaboratively with them. Whenever solvers need a physical space to meet and prototype their solutions, the app will also offer them the Plasma co working, meeting rooms and maker space schedules to make reservations. They will be able to use the Plasma space to hold face-to-face or video conference meetings with the problem initiators, sponsors, donors, etc. They can also use the Plasma maker space to produce physical prototypes and test them.

Our main long term outcome is to have people who usually don't have access to universities better understand our social importance, by giving them direct access to students and researchers. Another long term outcome is to form students who are more aware of their responsibility for societal problems.

The medium term outcomes are offering any single person or community in the society the opportunity to ask university students, researchers and professor to help them solve their important problems. These problems can involve developing a software or equipment that will help them be more effective in their everyday work, learning new skills that will allow them finding a better job, and so on, and they may require interdisciplinary teams to work on them.

Our short term outcome is a platform that will allow the matching between people in the "outside world" with these kinds of problems and people in the academic world with a variety of skills and the will to contribute to a better world.

• We are currently retrofitting the Plasma building and planning the e-plasma platform with a team of approximately 15 students from different fields. The building is expected to be ready by the end on this year, as well as the platform. By next year, we expect to be serving the whole University of Campinas population (40 thousand students, researchers and professors), linking them to the whole population of the Campinas metropolitan area (3 million people). In five years, we expect to offer our platform to other universities, initially in Brazil and then in other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Within the next year we plan to launch the platform and spread the word about it among the University and the outside communities. The development of the platform itself (including the app, the data base, the scheduling system, the communication system and a website) will be a first major effort to be solved by a team of students and researchers at the University. Within two years we hope to have connected a fair number of problem initiators in the Campinas metropolitan area to problem solvers at UNICAMP, so we can start reporting and publicizing their results. The third phase of the plan consists of opening the platform to other universities and other regions. This will require us to strengthen our database capacity and to translate our platform to other languages.

We will face technological, financial, organizational and process barriers. 

Technological: How to create a platform that is robust enough to allow multiple users to communicate, send videos, audios, etc. and match initiators and solvers?

Financial: How to subsidize the cost of hardware (servers, computers, etc.) and software, as well as third party services (programming, electronic marketing, publicity, communication, etc.)?

Organizational: How to convince the university's rulers to give credits to students, professors and researchers participating in this project, in order to allow them extra time to spend on solving social problems?

Process: How to assure continuity of long-term projects when dealing with students that may be graduating or going abroad on exchange programs?

Technological: The Plasma space will congregate students and professors from different fields, who can help with their specific expertise.

Financial: The Plasma space will host a number of different activities, both for-profit and not-for-profit. Among those, some will be devoted to raise funds for projects such as solving social problems through the e-plasma platform.

Organizational: We have already started conversations with the Offices of Undergraduate and Graduate Programs to ensure the validity of these activities as academic credits for both students and professors.

Process: We will establish a very systematic procedure so that new participants will be able to pick up at the point where previous participants have left.

We believe that by expanding our platform to Latin America and the Caribbean we can be even more successful in solving social problems, since we will be able to hear from people with a wider variety of backgrounds, some of whom may already have faced similar problems.

We are a team of students and professors developing the organizational structure and future activities for a new co working and maker space being implemented at the University of Campinas.

Full-time staff: one professor and one staff member

Part-time collaborators: 15 students

More professors and students will take part in the project as it evolves.

We have the full support of the University's president (prof. Marcelo Knobel) and of the Deans of Graduate (prof. Nancy Garcia) and of Undergraduate Programs (Prof. Eliana Amaral) to make Plasma a very successful new project/facility at UNICAMP. They want Plasma to be not only an innovative learning space, but also something meaningful to society.

We have been visiting a number of companies in our region, such as Bosch, CPQD, WEME and CPFL, to ask for financial support. We have also been meeting existing students organizations and social entrepreneurs in our University that are already helping to solve social problems, such as Enactus (https://www.enactusunicamp.org/).

Our business model will consist of different ways of funding, depending on each societal problem being tackled. Certain problems will require finding donors or supporters, or also using funds generated at the Plasma through activities such as courses or consulting  services offered by volunteer students. Other problems may involve the development of solutions that can be patented and possibly converted in sources of income. In that case, with the help of the University's innovation office, Inova, we will help students to register their inventions and share the profits between all the stakeholders in a fair way.

The Plasma will be managed by a team of students, supervised by a professor. The team will be organized in committees devoted to different aspects of the administration, such as (1) contacting partners, supporters and donors, (2) organizing fund-raising activities, such as extension courses and consulting, (3) communicating with the academic and external communities, (4) developing technological solutions and (5) keeping the accountability. The team will have access to a bank account where donations and funds raised through services will be kept, and spent when necessary to develop projects. 

By having to organize ideas and write down a proposal, we had the opportunity to further refine our ideas in terms of how we can make Plasma a real point of connection between the university and society.

We plan to establish close partnerships with students' teams that are already tacking societal problems at the University and to bring in external partners, such as CPQD, to help us solving our technological challenges, or CPFL, as a sponsor.