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Public Scholarship

I am a practitioner who collaborates with community and campus partners on ethical and sustainable technology projects.

• Ethical: Guided by principles of critical and transformational civic engagement as articulated by [Mitchell 2008] and [Bringle et al 2009]; centering the knowledge and needs of community and campus partners, and involving partners as full collaborators throughout the process.

• Sustainable: Embarking on projects with an eye towards longevity and maintenance, recognizing that technology breaks and becomes obsolete, and that needs and goals change over time.

• Technology: Loosely construed; projects that involve technology or critique technology to solve a particular problem. Could involve implementation, design, prototyping, or policy.

Projects and partners

Below are examples of past collaborations with campus and community partners.

Comps projects (senior capstone)

Completing a Senior Comprehensive Exercise ("Comps") is a requirement for all majors at Carleton. Computer Science students work in small teams over one or two terms on a faculty-specified project for their Comps. Projects typically involve a theoretical component (designing algorithms, analyzing data) and an implementation component (designing, developing, and testing software).

I have directed 9 distinct Comps projects with community or campus partners. A sampling are described below.

Northfield Youth Services Participation Tracking, 2017-2020

Community partners: Northfield Union of Youth (NUY), Healthy Community Initiative

Designed and implemented an online participation tracking system and database to measure who is engaging with NUY services, when are people engaging with these services, how often people are engaging with these services, and which services people use. This data allows NUY to better allocate volunteer resources, determine potential services an individual might benefit from receiving, and demonstrate the benefit of its services to the public.

Project snapshots:

• 2017-18 (Year 1 prototype)
• 2018-19 (Year 2 prototype, deployed)
• 2019-20 (Year 3, interrupted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic)

Carleton Geothermal Data, 2022-23

Campus partner: Bruce Duffy

Created a dashboard allowing Carleton community members (students, faculty, staff) to interact with historical and current data from the campus geothermal system. Also designed an API to allow access to this geothermal data, so that community members can write their own scripts to grab and analyze the data.

See a proof of concept of this dashboard here.

Bridging the Digital Divide: Policy Proposals for Equitable Internet Access in Northfield, 2020-21

Community partners: Healthy Community Initiative, Northfield Public Schools

Compiled background research and presented recommendations for sustainable and equitable community-wide internet access in Northfield, partially in response to the inequities in internet access exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for students to access school remotely. All the materials (case studies, recommendations, coverage maps) can be found at this site.

Humanitarian Free / Open Source Software Development, 2017-19.

Community partners: Cornerstone.js, Open Food Network

The idea behind free / open source software (FOSS) is that anyone can download, examine, modify, add to, play with, remix, etc. the code of an existing project, and ideally contribute changes back to the code base. This makes software development a global collaborative experience, removing many of the barriers to contributing to a software development project. Humanitarian FOSS (HFOSS) projects address social issues like health care, economic development, and disaster management.

Students contributed to two different HFOSS projects:

• Cornerstone.js, 2017-18, a medical image rendering tool used by open medical records systems. The team describes their contributions here.
• Open Food Network, 2018-19, a project aimed at localizing and decentralizing food distribution. The team fixed a number of usability issues and created interactive API documentation; they describe their contributions here.

Other ACE Comps projects

• Northfield Area Learning Center Lunch Ordering System, 2021-23 (advised second year team, 2022-23), with the Northfield Area Learning Center.
• Winter Wellness Challenge, 2017-18, with Carleton's Office of Health Promotion.
• Caring for Caregivers, 2015-16.

CS 344, Human-Computer Interaction, Spring 2024

Over ten weeks, student teams worked with six community / campus partners to prototype early-stage solutions to address some issue in the partner's workflow -- or, as I like to call it, "productively dream" with the partners. The project summaries and partners (in bold) are listed below. (Further information about the projects may be available upon request.)

• Alumni Relations Office, Carleton. Streamline processes used to track the logistics of alumni event planning, and in particular Reunion.

• Northfield Public Schools. Analyze the structure and placement of critical district and school-specific information (i.e. how easy is it for parents/guardians and staff to find and utilize critical information) and propose new ideas to organize and communicate this information.

• Spark and Stitch Institute. Analyze how parents and educators navigate resources on the institute's website and propose website improvements.

• Constellation of the Commons. Analyze the usability of the visualization of organizations and themes on the website, focusing on discoverability and scalability.

• Center for Community and Civic Engagement, Carleton. (2 projects) Automate risk management procedures and documentation; perform an information analysis of the center's website.

Publications and presentations

• Amy Csizmar Dalal, Stan Kurkovsky, Patricia Morreale, and Mikey Goldweber. 2025. How to Teach Software Engineering for Societal and Social Impact. In Proceedings of the 56th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 (SIGCSETS 2025). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1691–1692. https://doi.org/10.1145/3641555.3704711

• Amy Csizmar Dalal and Emily Oliver. 2022. A Case Study of a Multiyear Community-Engaged Learning Capstone in Computer Science. In Journal of Higher Education Outreach and Engagement 26(1), April 2022.

References

• [Bringle et al 2009] Robert G. Bringle, Patti H. Clayton, and Mary F. Price 2009. Partnerships in Service Learning and Civic Engagement. Partnerships: A Journal of Service Learning and Civic Engagement 1(1), Summer 2009.

• [Mitchell 2008] Tania D. Mitchell. 2008. Traditional vs. Critical Service-Learning: Engaging the Literature to Differentiate Two Models. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, Spring 2008, pp. 50-65.