Supporting Statement

OMB Control #0693-0033

Expiration Date: 07/31/2022

NIST Generic Clearance for Program Evaluation Data Collections

2020 National Institute of Standards and Technology Differential Privacy Temporal Map Challenge Questionnaire

FOUR STANDARD SURVEY QUESTIONS

1. Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) intends to distribute our questionnaire to individuals and groups who have registered to participate in the 2020 Differential Privacy Temporal Map Challenge, a prize challenge being conducted by the NIST, Public Safety Communications Division (PSCR). One or more contestants will participate in the challenge by registering as a team with a public team name of their own choice. Each team will be invited to complete a questionnaire at the time they register and when they submit their final solutions. These and other solvers are critical to the success of PSCR’s Open Innovation program and the information that we collect will help PSCR to guide the development of its programing and to be more responsive to our program’s participants.

Based on previous programs, we expect approximately 100 teams to participate in the challenge. The registration questionnaire and the submission questionnaire each require approximately 5 minutes to complete.

2. Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested parties, pre-testing, and responses to suggestions for improvement.

PSCR developed this information collection internally. Interviews with previous prize contestants informed the design of the questions and overall length of the survey.

3. Explain how the survey will be conducted, how customers will be sampled if fewer than all customers will be surveyed, expected response rate, and actions your agency plans to take to improve the response rate.

All teams competing in the 2020 Differential Privacy Temporal Map Challenge will be invited to complete the questionnaire at the time of registration and at the time they make their submission to the competition. This challenge has three independent phases, therefore teams will have up to three registrations and three submissions. Therefore, teams will be asked to complete the questionnaire a maximum of six times. Because there are expected to be 100 participants in this Challenge, NIST calculates the public burden of this information collection to be 600 respondents (100 participants who could be given the questionnaire up to 6 times during the Challenge process), * 5 minutes / 60 (minutes) = 50 burden hours. To increase participation, challenge participants will be sent up to three email reminders to complete the survey if they do not complete the survey at the time of registration or submission.

The questionnaire will be administered electronically using Google Forms through a NIST-managed account.

Information will not be saved in a Privacy Act System of Records. Information will be retrieved by competition team name or user name, rather than a personal identifier. A SORN and Privacy Act Statement are not applicable to this collection.

4. Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize the results to the entire customer population.

This questionnaire seeks the answers to the following questions: A) What are the factors that motivate contestants to participate and how do these motivations affect their success? B) What are the tools participants are using to prepare their submissions? C) How much time are contestants spending on the competition? and D) How do contestants’ previous experiences affect their performance? We will also be asking contestants to share their ideas to improve our programs.

For each of the program evaluation questions above, we have designed one or more information collection questions. We plan to correlate each of these questions with participant success by two metrics: the conversion of registrations to submissions and the success of submissions, i.e., if submissions receive a prize award.