Assessment of a Crowdsourcing Open Call for Approaches to University Community Engagement and Strategic Planning During COVID-19

Key Points Question Is a crowdsourcing open call a feasible approach to engaging the university community in COVID-19 safety strategies? Findings This qualitative study evaluated 82 submissions to a university open call for creative solutions from students, faculty, and staff to inform safety in the fall 2020 semester. Solutions were shared with university leadership, and several are being further developed. Meaning The results of this study suggest that open calls are a promising approach to understanding university community members’ concerns and identifying stakeholder-driven, innovative solutions for safe university activity during the pandemic.


Introduction
The global COVID-19 pandemic has upended university life. 1 Indoor, group-based, and in-person interactions are mainstays of the university experience but also facilitate COVID-19 transmission. 2 Universities must resolve this tension to safely continue campus operations while addressing the concerns of students, staff, and faculty. In addition, COVID-19 has also profoundly impacted the methods used to develop new plans and engage the community. 3 Furthermore, conventional university planning is often a top-down, expert-driven process with few opportunities for input from university community stakeholders. 4 One promising community engagement method during COVID-19 has been to use a crowdsourcing open call. An open call provides a structured mechanism to aggregate wisdom from groups in response to a specific problem, and exceptional contributed solutions are then shared with the public. 5 The US Office of Science and Technology Policy identified open calls as a centerpiece of the US Strategy for American Innovation, and the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act gives all government agencies the broad authority to conduct open challenges to promote innovation. 6 Open calls have been used extensively by health and scientific research organizations as an innovative approach to problem solving, including the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 7 and the National Institutes of Health Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. 8 Randomized clinical trials have demonstrated the effectiveness of crowdsourcing across an array of health topics, 9 and social science research has shown that open calls can enhance community engagement through the meaningful participation of a broad range of local stakeholders. 10,11 For example, a crowdsourcing open call on the topic of HIV cure research resulted in creative contributions from local stakeholders and the development of messaging around HIV cure research that was both culturally appropriate and resonated with communities that are disproportionately impacted by HIV. 12 In addition, compared with other community engagement mechanisms (eg, community advisory boards), crowdsourcing open calls have been found to engage a broader range of stakeholders whose perspectives are often underrepresented in health and medical research, including individuals with lower levels of education and lower incomes. 13 Although there have been several crowdsourcing open calls to inform universities' planning during COVID-19, [14][15][16][17] none have been formally evaluated in terms of their process and outcomes. In addition, the limited existing research evaluating crowdsourcing open calls has not focused on emergency response to pandemics. 9 This study seeks to address both of these gaps by presenting

Open Call Design and Implementation
independently from UNC leadership's official planning for the fall semester, 18 19 eligible submissions were then distributed among the judging team for evaluation of idea quality based on a set of 4 criteria: potential effect on the safety and well-being of the university community; innovation, feasibility, and inclusivity (in terms of gender, race/ethnicity, and disability). Each submission was assigned to 5 judges who independently provided a score for each on a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being lowest quality and 10 being highest quality).

Open Call Participation
The open call received 82 submissions in total. After initial screening for eligibility, 80 submissions

Challenges, Goals, and Solutions for a Safe Semester
We qualitatively analyzed the challenges, goals, and solutions proposed by each of the submissions to the open call. Five common themes emerged across challenges and goals pertaining to COVID-19 infection risk: safety, remote learning, mental health, racism/inequality, and transportation. These themes are summarized in Table 3 with examples of proposed solutions.

Implementation of Open Call Submissions
After the judging period, 18 finalist and runner-up teams agreed to be showcased on the Carolina Collective website. Among these 18 teams, 17 indicated interest in recruiting community members (UNC students, faculty, and staff) to join their project and requested that this be included in their feature (along with team contact information). All 24 finalist and runner-up teams responded that they were interested in implementing their idea at UNC; all but 3 teams indicated that they would be interested in an elective credit option (although of the 3 declining teams, 2 were composed of staffonly participants and 1 was composed of graduate students for whom elective credit would not be relevant). All of the finalists and runners-up received support from Innovate Carolina, a UNC office focused on innovation and entrepreneurship. 27 For runners-up, this support included outreach from A lack of mental health support and escalation of COVIDrelated distress To provide mental health support Virtual social events, online support groups, and allowing family members to visit students in a safe space that follows the COVID-19 protection rules (eg, face covering and plastic shield between visitors and students).
The negative impact of racism and inequities on campus and/or in the university system on health and safety during the pandemic To address health equity across different groups Programs to ensure equal access to protective gear, offering food stamps or healthy meals to individuals having food insecurity, work safety and pay increase for low-income workers, and raising the awareness of racial/ ethnic disparities in health.

Reduced operation of public transportation
To ensure equal access to safe transportation Increasing affordable on-campus parking, expanding bus services to lower passenger load on a single vehicle, setting up a bus seat sign-up system, and operating direct bus routes between student dorms and grocery stores.
Innovate Carolina to provide relevant resources for further development of their ideas (eg, linkage to entrepreneurship programs and events). For finalists, Innovate Carolina organized one-on-one meetings to discuss the next steps in implementing their ideas and ways that the office could provide support. In addition, the Carolina Collective organizing committee met with 4 university leaders to share top-scoring ideas and promote implementation and shared communications-related submissions with a pan-university communications committee.

Discussion
In Third, open call data collected in this study may provide a formal mechanism to better understand community concerns during COVID-19. This finding is consistent with a study on crowdsourced narratives providing an opportunity for social listening. 30 The findings of the current study provided an early warning signal about faculty, staff, and student concerns related to reopening. These findings demonstrate how crowdsourcing can provide novel insights into community concerns that thus far have been absent from institutional responses to the pandemic.