Student Researchers in the Senior Sequence help grow the
Regional Workbench Consortium (RWBC)

Students in the Senior Sequence play a vital value-adding role in the Regional Workbench Consortium (RWBC). The RWBC is a collaborative network of university and community-based partners dedicated to enabling sustainable city-region development. We promote multidisciplinary research and service learning aimed at understanding how problems of environment and development interrelate across local, regional and global scales.

The RWBC focuses on the Southern California-Northern Baja California transborder region--especially the San Diego-Tijuana city-region and coastal zone. RWBC partners come from academia, industry, government, and community-based organizations. Through a student-mentor, partnership-driven approach, the RWBC explicitly integrates issues of equity, environmental stewardship, and economic efficiency (the so-called 3 Es of sustainable development). In the process, we are weaving together innovative advances in three domains: Information and Communications Technology, New Regionalism, and Sustainability Science.

The RWBC is building a trusted Internet-based research portal and toolkit (i.e., workbench) to facilitate problem-driven projects that require region-wide data integration and information sharing. Currently we are placing a major emphasis on building planning and decision-support tools, inlcuding: GIS, Quality of Life Indicators, on-line interactive mapping and 3D visualization. The RWBC is encouraging students to study water, toxics, housing, colonias, and regional planning as priorities for linking research and action. Our aim is to create more efficient, interactive, and equitable methods for integrating university-based science with the fast-changing needs of industry, government, non-profit and community-based organizations. The RWBC's tight linkage with the Senior Sequence is creating a platform for innovative education, outreach and workforce development.

The seven fundamental precepts guiding the RWBC, are also good points for students to take into account when formulating their Senior Research Projects:

Seven fundamental precepts guiding the RWBC

Place-based, scalable	· Facilitate multidisciplinary place-based research in a scalable context (i.e., a conceptual space that interrelates local, regional and global dynamics).
Integrative, multidisciplinary	· Link the “new regionalism” with sustainability science and advances in information and communications technologies. · Create methods for integrating physical, biological and socioeconomic data (including the ability to do cross-border integrated risk assessment).
Normative	· Promote the three E’s of sustainable development (equity, environmental stewardship, and economic efficiency) in a whole-systems approach.
Problem-driven, action oriented	· Pursue a core set of pressing problems (projects) that inspire the linkage of knowledge to action at the regional scale.
Collaborative and multicultural	· Foster relationships and networks driving the shift from “planning for the public” to “planning with the public.” · Serve as a culturally sensitive platform for education, outreach and training.
Historical and Forward-looking	· Seek historically-informed views of alternative futures (i.e., actionable “Vision” based on critical understanding and current knowledge of relevant literature).
Accessible, user-friendly, network extensible	· Build capacity for data and information sharing (based on principles of distributed intelligence and federation). · Create story-based narratives and multi-media presentations that offer meaningful views of the RWBC’s projects (tailored to distinct audiences including researchers, public agencies, community groups, and students).

As it evolves, the RWB website will contain projects, searchable topic maps, data guides, tutorials, and interactive tools for conceptualizing, designing, conducting, and sharing multidisciplinary research. Three broad objectives of the Regional Workbench are to:

• Provide a mode of communication among University, Industry, Government and Community-based Organizations, thereby enabling an interactive networking of researchers with the end-users of research;
• Integrate research with action for social learning and sustainable development in the San Diego-Tijuana global city-region and beyond (targeting regional planning and policy)
• Develop a series of integrated "topic maps" to facilitate multidisciplinary research (a "topic map" is defined here as coherent conceptual domain with associated archives, professional and institutional contacts, data sources, data mining tools, metrics, methods and annotated guides for inquiry and action).

The RWB aims to add value to, not replicate, existing data warehouses and regional/geographic information systems. The RWB's objective is to build synergy through partnerships by leveraging resources, capitalizing on the expertise of participants, and enabling an integrated approach to research, education, outreach and training. University students and faculty, together with community partners, build the RWB's website. Students gain hands-on experience in a manner that emphasizes civic-minded workforce development as well as multidisciplinary scholarship.

Resources on Community-University Collaborations
(a list compiled by UCSD's Cross-Cultural Center)

Axel-Lute, Miriam. "Town & Gown: Making Research Setve Communities' Needs." Shelterforce Online, (National Housing Institute, November/December 1999). http://wvtw.1oka.org/town&gown.htm

Feagin, Joe and Hernan Vera. 2001. Liberation Sociology. Westview Press.

Fischer, Frank. 2000. Citizens, Experts and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge. Duke University Press.

Loka Institute. Doing Community-based Research: A Reader. Loka Institute, Washington, D.C. http://www.loka.org/crn/case_study.htm

· Town & Gown: Making Research Serve Communities' Needs

Nyden, Phil, Anne Figert, Mark Shibley and Darryl Burrows. 1997. Building Community: Social Science in Action. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.

Philo, Greg and David Miller. 2001. Market Killing: What the Free Market Does and What Social Scientist Can Do About it. Longman Publishers.

Price, David. 2004. Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of ActivistAnthropologists .Duke University Press.

Stoecker, Randy. 1996. "Sociology and Social Action: An Introduction." Sociological Imagination 33: 3-17.
Stoecker, Randy and Edna Bonacich. 1992. "Why Participatory Research." American Sociologist 23: 5-14

Other Sources
Policy Research Action Group (http://wwwJuc.edu/cud/prag/) "
PRAGmatics: The Journal of Community-Based Research
The Regional Workbench Consortium (http://www.regionalworkbench.org/)
Community-Based Collaboratives Research Consortium (http://www.cbcrc.org/)
Loka Institute (http://www.loka.org/)