Congress has approved the 2015 NSF budget - a $7.344 billion allotment which represents a 2.4% increase over 2014 monies. Jeffrey Mervis provides a good overview in his recent article on the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Science Magazine website. Of particular interest to the ATE community, the NSF's educational directorate came away with approximately an extra $20 million, to be spent on undergraduate STEM programs and an overhaul of science-oriented graduate programs.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' report, Women in the Labor Force: A Datebook, which was published in December 2014, is now available here. The report covers such areas as demographic characteristics, educational attainment, occupation and industry, earnings, hours of work, and other interesting comparisons of women in the workforce in 2013 compared to previous years. For ATE projects and centers interested in drawing in more women, the National Institute for Women in Trades, Technology, and Science is always a useful resource.

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Want to know which ATE Projects and Centers and ATE partners and collaborators are using Social Media? Check out our ATE Social Media Directory and follow a Project or Center!

Community College enrollment has dipped slightly in recent years, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. It can be interesting, then, to note which schools are bucking the trends. This report from Community College Week lists the fastest growing community colleges in the country in four enrollment categories, including schools with an enrollment under 2,500 students, schools with an enrollment between 2,500 and 4,999 students, schools that enroll between 5,000 and 9,999 students, and those community colleges that enroll more than 10,000 students.

Join Nancy Maron, Program Director of Sustainability and Scholarly Communications at ITHAKA S&R, and Edward Almasy, Director and Co-PI of ATE Central, for the first webinar in our spring series: Planning, Goal Setting, and Follow-Through. As we all know, planning and goal setting in terms of grant funded projects may seem obvious: the terms of the grant spell out the aims of the work and its need, the timings and budget. Still, for multi-year grants or projects that are moving into the post-grant phase, setting achievable goals that address both the short and very long term ambitions of the initiative is harder than it looks. Date: Tuesday, February 10, 2014, 2pm eastern Length: 90 minutes Sign Up: http://www.matecnetworks.org/webreg/ate_central.php For more information on this webinar and others in the series, click here

Many ATE projects and centers rely on the web to disseminate the resources they create, though not all have the infrastructure necessary to sustain online access to these resources over time. In order to preserve the resources created by ATE awardees -- thereby broadening the impact and reach of the ATE community as a whole -- ATE Central offers a digital archiving service that is designed to provide access to these valuable materials beyond the lives of those projects and centers that created them. Come learn about the ATE Central archiving requirement, discuss strategies, and work through a basic archiving checklist! Join us at the 2014 ATE PI Conference in Washington, DC: Date: Thursday, October 23, 2014 Time: 2:30pm - 3:45pm Location: Ambassador, Omni Shoreham Hotel

ATE Central and AACC are pleased to announce the release of the 2014 ATE PI Conference mobile app! The app and companion website are designed to help you make the most of your conference experience. Use your phone, tablet, or Internet browser to create a personal schedule, stay up-to-date with the agenda and speaker lineup, search the attendee directory, and more! The app is available for iPhone or iPad as well as Android devices. To download the app, search your app store for "2014 ATE PI Conference" or simply follow the appropriate link from your mobile device. For up-to-date information on the 2014 ATE PI Conference mobile app and more about the meeting, follow @ATECentral and @Comm_College on Twitter, or visit ATE Central staff at Booth #002 (Oct 22-24)!

On September 12, Nancy Maron, Program Director of Sustainability and Scholarly Communications at Ithaka S&R, and Rachael Bower, Director and PI of ATE Central, presented a webinar providing an overview of sustainability issues of interest to ATE projects and centers. Key topics included the importance of defining what sustainability means in relation to your specific project or center deliverables and goals, how understanding your audience relates to sustainability planning, and why measuring the impact of what you’re doing is critical to the process. If you missed the webinar, you can still watch the recording.

Are you interested in designing a more effective dissemination and marketing plan for your project or center? If so, then check out ATE Central's Outreach Kit at atecentral.net/outreach. This online toolkit includes a Planning Guide to show you, step by step, how to build and execute a realistic and achievable outreach plan. Learn new and innovative ways to reach your audience and connect with the ATE community and beyond with the Social Media Guide. Use the Communications Guide to craft your project or center's message, discover new dissemination paths, and learn to build your own media kit. In addition, you will find a Resources section which will direct you to some best practices within NSF and ATE, other free and low-cost outreach tools, further helpful links, and some suggested reading. If you're ready to show Broader Impacts and ensure your NSF mission, then get started with the ATE Outreach Kit.