The revolution will not be in open data

By Duncan Edwards

I’ve had a lingering feeling of unease that things were not quite right in the world of open development and ICT4D (Information and communication technology for development), so at September’s Open Knowledge Conference in Geneva I took advantage of the presence of some of the world’s top practitioners in these two areas to explore the question:

How does “openness” really effect change within development? 

Inspiration for the session came from a number of conversations I’ve had over the last few years.

My co-conspirator/co-organiser of the OKCon side event “Reality check: Ethics and Risk in Open Development,” Linda Raftree, had also been feeling uncomfortable with the framing of many open development projects, assumptions being made about how “openness + ICTs = development outcomes,” and a concern that risks and privacy were not being adequately considered.

We had been wondering whether the claims made by Open Development enthusiasts were substantiated by any demonstrable impact. For some reason, as soon as you introduce the words “open data” and “ICT,” good practice in development gets thrown out the window in the excitement to reach “the solution”.

A common narrative in many “open” development projects goes along the lines of “provide access to data/information –> some magic occurs –> we see positive change.” In essence, because of the newness of this field, we only know what we think happens, we don’t know what really happens because there is a paucity of documentation and evidence.

It’s problematic that we often use the terms data, information, and knowledge interchangeably, because:

• Data is NOT knowledge 
• Data is NOT information 
• Information is NOT knowledge. 

Knowledge is what you know.

It’s the result of information you’ve consumed, your education, your culture, beliefs, religion, experience – it’s intertwined with the society within which you live.

Understanding and thinking through how we get from the “openness” of data, to how this affects how and what people think, and consequently how they might act, is critical in whether “open” actually has any additional impact.

Can applying a Theory of Change help us answer this question?

At Wednesday’s session, panellist Matthew Smith from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) talked about the commonalities across various open initiatives. Matthew argued that a larger Theory of Change (ToC) around how ‘open’ leads to change on a number of levels could allow practitioners to draw out common points. The basic theory we see in open initiatives is “put information out, get a feedback loop going, see change happen.” But open development can be sliced in many ways, and we tend to work in silos when talking about openness. We have open educational resources, open data, open government, open science, etc. We apply ideas and theories of openness in a number of domains but we are not learning across these domains.

We explored the theories of change underpinning two active programmes that incorporate a certain amount of “openness” in their logic.

Simon Colmer from the Knowledge Services department at the Institute of Development Studies outlined their theory of change of how research evidence can help support decision-making in development policy-making and practice. While Erik Nijland from HIVOS presented elements of the theory of change that underpins the Making All Voices Count programme, which looks to increase the links between citizens and governments to improve public services and deepen democracy.

Both of these ToCs assume that because data/information is accessible, people will use it within their decision-making processes. They also both assume that intermediaries play a critical role in analysis, translation, interpretation, and contextualisation of data and information to ensure that decision makers (whether citizens, policy actors, or development practitioners) are able to make use of it. Although access is theoretically open, in practice even mediated access is not equal – so how might this play out in respect to marginalised communities and individuals?

What neither ToC really does is unpack who these intermediaries are. What are their politics? What are their drivers for mediating data and information? What is the effect of this? A common assumption is that intermediaries are somehow neutral and unbiased – does this assumption really hold true? 

What many open data initiatives do not consider is what happens after people are able to access and internalise open data and information. How do people act once they know something?

As Vanessa Herringshaw from the Transparency and Accountability Initiative said in the Raising the Bar for ambition and quality in OGP session, “We know what transparency should look like but things are a lot less clear on the accountability end of things”.

There are a lot of unanswered questions. Do citizens have the agency to take action? Who holds power? What kind of action is appropriate or desirable? Who is listening? And if they are listening, do they care?

Linda finished up the panel by raising some questions around the assumptions that people make decisions based on information rather than on emotion, and that there is a homogeneous “public” or “community” that is waiting for data/information upon which to base their opinions and actions.

So as a final thought, here’s my (perhaps clumsy) 2013 update on Gil Scott Heron’s 1970 song “The Revolution will not be televised”:

“The revolution will NOT be in Open data,
It will NOT be in hackathons, data dives, and mobile apps,
It will NOT be broadcast on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube,
It will NOT be live-streamed, podcast, and available on catch-up
The revolution will not be televised”

Heron’s point, which holds true today, was that “the revolution” or change, starts in the head. We need to think carefully about how we get far beyond access to data.

This blog was originally published as an Open Knowledge Foundation blog. Duncan Edwards is ICT Innovations Manager at the Institute of Development Studies. Follow Duncan on Twitter. 


Other blogs by Duncan on Impact and Learning: 

•  Open data and increasing the impact of research? It's a piece of cake!

Open data and increasing the impact of research? It's a piece of cake!

By Duncan Edwards

I talk to a lot of friends and colleagues who work in research, knowledge intermediary, and development organisations about some of the open data work I’ve been doing in relation research communications. Their usual response is “so it’s about technology?” or “open data is about governance and transparency, right?”. Well no, it’s not just about technology and it’s broader than governance and transparency.

I believe that there is real potential for open data approaches in increasing the impact of research knowledge for poverty reduction and social justice. In this post I outline how I see Open Data fitting within a theory of change of how research knowledge can influence development.

Every year thousands of datasets, reports and articles are generated about development issues. Yet much of this knowledge is kept in ‘information silos’ and remains unreachable and underused by broader development actors. Material is either not available or difficult to find online. There can be upfront fees, concerns regarding intellectual property rights, fears that institutions/practitioners don’t have the knowhow, means or time to share, or political issues within an organisation that can mean this material is not used.

What is “Open data”? What is “Linked Open Data”? 

The Open Knowledge Foundation says “a piece of content or data is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.”

The Wikipedia entry for Linked Data describes it as“a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried…. the idea is very old and is closely related to concepts including database network models, citations between scholarly articles, and controlled headings in library catalogs.”

So Linked Open Data can be described as Open Data which is published in a way that can be interlinked with other datasets. Think about two data sets with country categorisation – if you publish these as linked data, you can then make the link between related content between different datasets for any given country.

For more definitions and discussion on data see Tim Davies post "Untangling the data debate: definitions and implications".

Why should Open Data be of interest to research producers? 

The way in which the Internet and technology has evolved means that instead of simply producing a website from which people can consume your content, you can open up your content so that others can make use of, and link it in new and exciting ways.

There are many theories of change which look to articulate how research evidence can affect development policy and practice. The Knowledge Services department at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) works with a theory of change which views access to, and demand for, research knowledge, along with the capacity to engage effectively with it, as critical elements to research evidence uptake and use in relation to decision-making within development. Open Data has significant potential in relation to the ‘access to’ element of this theory of change.

Contextualisation and new spaces 

When we think about access to research knowledge – we should go beyond simply having access to a research document. Instead we must look at whether research knowledge is available in a suitable format and language, and whether it has been contextualised in a way which makes sense to an audience within a given environment.

I like to use a Data cake metaphor developed by Mark Johnstone to illustrate this - if we consider research outputs to be the data/ingredients for the cake, then we organise, summarise and catalogue this (i.e. add meta-data) to ‘bake’ into our information cake. We then present this information in a way in which we feel is most useful and “palatable” to our intended audiences with the intention they will consume it and be able to make use of new knowledge. It’s in this area that Open Data approaches can really increase the potential uptake of research – if you make your information/ content open it creates the possibility that other intermediaries can easily make use of this content to contextualise and present it to their own users in a way that is more likely to be consumed.

Essentially by opening up datasets of research materials you can reduce duplication, allow people to reuse, repurpose, remix this content in many more spaces thereby increasing the potential for research findings to be taken up and influencing change in the world.

While I see significant benefits in researchers making their outputs available and accessible in an open manner we must redress the dominance of knowledge generated in the global North. We need to continue to invest in the strengthening of intermediaries at local, national, and international levels to make use of research material and Open Data to influence positive change.

Duncan Edwards is the ICT Innovations Manager at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) - you can follow him on Twitter: @duncan_ids

NOTE: an admission on Open Access - The original article this post is based on, “Davies, T. and Edwards, D. (2012) 'Emerging Implications of Open and Linked Data for Knowledge Sharing in Development', IDS Bulletin 43 (5) 117-127”, published in the IDS Bulletin: “New Roles for Communication in Development?”. Ironically, considering it’s subject matter, is only partially open access (two free articles per issue). But you can access this article as green open access in Open Docs - http://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/2247

Comparing research and oranges II: do communities want oranges or flowers?

By Simon Batchelor

In her blog, Comparing research and oranges: what can we learn from value chain analysis?, my colleague Elise Wach asks whether “producing research first and then deciding how to communicate it afterwards the same as growing an orange and then deciding how and where it will be sold?” She went on to speculate whether value chain analysis can add something to our own analyses of how to strengthen the knowledge value chain.

Her piece reminded me of a video we used at a team retreats, entitled Whose Reality Counts. Produced by Praxis, based in India, it also caused us to wonder about the comparison with research production, and the processes of setting a research agenda.


In case you don’t have the time to watch the 7 minute video (but please do – it's so well done!) here's a quick synopsis:

A senior office-based person sits and has a bright idea: giving flowers to a poor community. The idea is passed down the decision-making chain to farmers in the poor community, who, initially pleased, begin to plant flowers.

However, still sat in his office, the official continues to pass flowers down the line, and we see the farmer becoming frustrated with too many flowers and not enough diversity of food, which is what the community really wants. The community cannot make their voices heard, until the official goes to the community himself expecting to see grateful villagers and a thousand flowers. That’s not what he finds on his arrival, and it's only after listening the villagers and their needs that he gains an understanding what they really need - their reality as described by them.

For me, the parallels are obvious. Research conducted in isolation from the realities in the field may produce insights, and these initial insights may even be appreciated by the community. However, communities have priorities and there needs to be a feedback loop to find out what those priorities are and whether our research needs to be redirected.

As Elise says in her blog “When is audience research necessary, and when does the ‘if we build it, they will come’ assumption apply? Where is the line between research communication and advocacy? How can we create demand and to what extent should we do so?”

So, whose responsibility is it to set the research agenda?

In a recent review of plans from leading research centres, we had to ask ‘where are the boundaries for a researcher’. If the research centres are intending to change the world in some way (their stated intention) then there needs to be engagement with the outside world during the research.

We ended up noting two type of engagement:

• ‘A need to engage with a representative sample of the end users to ensure that new hybrids or practices fit the ‘real world’ farming systems’. 
• And ‘there are the actors at the boundary of the research who might take the research forward. At some point, research that has led to successful product development will need to go to scale’.

Isolated research may change the world slightly, but may also rapidly become too many flowers when the community needs food. However you frame it – as Value chains with Customer feedback and monitoring market demand, or as participatory development with consultation and ‘mainstreaming the voices of the poor’, research that changes the world is going to require tight feedback loops and a view that is much wider than an agenda set by sitting in an office.

As good as gold? How and why to publish open access research

By Rachel Playforth

 The scholarly publishing revolution that has been steadily building for the past decade may now have reached a tipping point - the UK Government has pledged that all publicly funded research will be open access by 2014; the World Bank, UNESCO and many other major international organisations and funding bodies are backing open access; and a new set of recommendations updating the original Budapest Open Access Initiative is due out this year. But the corresponding media interest in open access hasn’t necessarily increased understanding – we’re all talking about it but do we really know what it is, what it’s for, or how to do it?

What is open access?

Image from: http://openreflections.wordpress.com/

The free and irrevocable availability of research outputs on the public internet, permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of these outputs, without financial, legal, or technical barriers.


What is not open access?
Content that requires registration or is offered free for a limited period only. Formats that prevent downloading, saving, printing or copying. Arguably, content where text mining or indexing by web crawling tools is prevented.



Why open access?
Because removing access barriers will enrich and accelerate research. Because scholars in poorer institutions and poorer countries shouldn’t be excluded. Because publishers shouldn’t make huge profits from research, peer-reviewing and editing work done by academics for free. Because we shouldn’t have to pay twice for publicly funded (and potentially vital) research, once through our taxes and once through subscriptions and fees paid to commercial publishers of scholarly journals.

Why else open access?
Because many funding bodies, including the Wellcome Trust, RCUK and DFID, require it as a condition of funding. Even if you are half-hearted about the ideology, you may have to embrace the reality.


Gold or green? 
There are two routes available to researchers who want (or need) to make their work open access, known as ‘gold’ and ‘green’. The costs of publishing in peer-reviewed journals are currently met by the reader (probably via their library), though subscription charges and pay-per-view fees.

Gold open access shifts the cost to the author, who pays (probably via their research funding or their institution) to publish in an open access journal. This was the approach most strongly recommended by the recent Finch report on expanding access to published research findings, and is the ultimate goal of the UK government. Based on the idea that full gold OA will eliminate the ‘paying twice’ problem with subscription journals, it’s been estimated that it could lead to whole system savings of around £80 million per year.

The other route is known as green open access, represented by research repositories. The majority of commercial scholarly publishers allow some form of ‘self-archiving’ in subject or institutional repositories, usually but not always with an embargo period to protect their revenues for the first few months after publication. If all journals were open access, there would of course be no need for embargo periods, and arguably, no need for repositories. (The Finch report sees their role shifting more towards preserving/sharing research data and grey literature). But in the current transition period where the subscription model coexists with the OA model, repositories are working successfully with both.

Repositories also offer advantages to researchers and institutions beyond open access policy compliance:

1. Impact: research shows that open access articles tend to be more cited than comparable material behind paywalls 
2. Discoverability: the protocols used by repository software are international and interoperable to facilitate data exchange and reuse, and the metadata standards mean the content is quickly indexed by Google and repository indexes. 
3. Preservation: the repository can store copies of research for posterity in a way that is independent of the original format (which may become obsolete). 
4. Reputation: a repository provides both an accurate record of, and shop window for, an institution’s (and an individual researcher’s) intellectual output. 
5. Flexibility: repositories can contain all forms of work including peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, working papers, presentations, images, audio, and data. 

But what about my intellectual property? 

True open access is compatible with protecting copyright and intellectual property – the one restriction on reuse is that the work should be properly attributed. There are various Creative Commons licences that can help make this explicit. An author who retains their copyright and makes their work open access has more control over that work than if they had transferred the copyright or given exclusive rights to a publisher, as is standard in many publishing contracts.

And my impact? 

Many researchers worry about diluting the impact and credibility of their research by taking the open access route. The number of established open access journals is currently too small to rival the impact factors of the major subscription offerings, it’s true, but this will change as open access is mandated more widely. As for repositories, self-archiving a copy of your article does not necessarily have an adverse effect on citations of the published version. It will certainly increase the number of times it is read, and many repositories provide a DOI and specify that the published version should be cited.

More information 
Find open access repositories on OpenDoar
Find open access journals on DOAJ 
Check journal self-archiving policies on SherpaRomeo  

Rachel Playforth is Repository Coordinator at the British Library for Development Studies, based at IDS. To find out more about the IDS Repository, hosted by OpenDocs, contact Rachel.

What should the post-2015 MDG (on water and sanitation) look like, and how would we measure it?

By Elise Wach

IDS Bulletin 43.2

On World Water Day, I had the opportunity to attend the IDS STEPS Centre launch of the IDS Bulletin on Politics and Pathways in Water and Sanitation. The discussion focused strongly around the MDGs: it was recently announced that the target for water had already been met, but there are a lot of questions about what that really means and how it was determined that we have ‘halved the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water’.

The panellists all lambasted the fact that the goal says nothing about equity.  And while the word ‘sustainability’ is included the target, there are serious doubts about how that is actually measured.  Katharina Welle’s research, for example, revealed that neither the neither the method used by the Ministry of Water and Energy (based on infrastructure completed) nor the method used by the JMP (based on household use of water) accurately captures the access issues that people in rural areas are grappling with.

This resonates quite strongly with the work I’m doing with the International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC) to synthesize the learning streams for the Triple-S Initiative, which is attempting to completely transform the rural water sector.  And I have been asking myself, if we wanted another round of MDGs, and if we kept the same sector-based approach (both are big ‘if’s’ and there are more), what would we want the water sector goal to look like, and how would we measure progress towards it?

I essentially worked backwards through a simplified theory of change, starting with the end goal. Based on the principles of Triple-S, I went ahead and defined the end goal to be:

Everyone has sustainable access to safe, adequate, and reliable water.

Essentially, there are five core components here (the five words in bold).  While they are all intrinsically linked to one another, let’s attempt to look at just one aspect of this: sustainability.

How do you measure sustainability?  You could go back and see if water services are still there in ten years’ time.  That’s useful, and I think it should be done (and so does Water for People) but how do we know now if water services will continue sustainably in ten years time?   

Perhaps we’d want to think about what is needed to ensure sustainability, and try to measure that. According to Triple-S, one prerequisite for ensuring that water services last is to ensure that there is the capacity, financing, and planning for major replacements in the future (i.e. not just maintenance). And there are a variety of other direct and indirect requirements for sustainability: ownership, inclusion, accountability, transparency, government capacity, and coordination to name a few.

So a big challenge would be to agree on the requirements for sustainability.  Assuming we can overcome this (daunting) hurdle, we’d then need to assess whether these are in place.  But measuring these won’t be as straightforward as measuring the number of people who live within a certain radius of a borehole.  And there are other issues as well, such as the issue of Multiple-Use Systems, as Stef Smits discusses.

It will be, in a word, complex.   

But if the issues we’re trying to address are complex (and they are - read more about "complexity" in this ODI working paper (PDF)), then it isn’t surprising that measuring progress and achievements is complex as well. 

While the simplicity of the MDGs may have helped mobilise support for development, that simplicity comes at a cost.  As Lindsey Nelson discussed in her STEPS presentation on multi-modal discourse last week, there are consequences to basing your strategy on a bumper sticker slogan.  Something to think about as we discuss the post-2015 development agenda.

Change is hard but not impossible with a little help from ELFs (part 2)

Guest post: We welcome back Elise Wach, Evaluation Consultant at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS)

To follow on from my post last week on how change is hard to achieve, even when you know an approach isn't working, here's an update on the Learning Retreat that the Impact and Learning Team facilitated for the IRC (International Water and Sanitation Centre) Triple-S Initiative. 

We kicked off the 2-day retreat by hearing reports back on the variety of learning streams that had taken place so far and assessing progress.  This led into discussions about the approach of the initiative as well as the approach of the evaluation and learning.  Were course corrections needed in order to achieve the desired outcomes of the initiative?  Were adjustments to the evaluation and learning methodologies needed in order to better capture initiative progress?

In terms of the approach of the initiative, one of the primary concerns was related to external communication - getting the right information out to the right people in a timely manner.  IRC’s key staff immediately made commitments to improve this:

1. Set up an organisational blog to get discussions started and put information out on the web (see Emilie Wilson’s entry about the merits of blogging).  
2. Post more information and resources on the website, even if not yet polished.  A key phrase throughout the retreat was to ‘not let the perfect be the enemy of the perfectly good’.  Resources and information may take the form of videos, slide decks, and less formal reports.
3. Improve the layout of the website to make it more user-friendly, and the search engine tags to make it easier to find.

Other commitments were also made to improve the approach of the initiative, including a re-visit to the Theory of Change.  This will surely be discussed in detail at the next Learning Retreat which will go into more depth into the data and its synthesis and also include the advisory group for the initiative (scheduled for the end of April).

See more at http://www.waterservicesthatlast.org  

In terms of the evaluation and learning approaches, a few changes will be made to the timing and scope of data collection and analysis.  For example, given the disconnect between policy and practice discussed in last week’s entry, it was decided that in addition to analysing the policy documents of key agencies and organisations in the water sector, IRC and ILT will also analyse documents that might indicate that shifts in policies are being reflected in practice, such as calls for proposals and project reports.  That information will of course be posted on the Triple-S website in an effort to give these agencies a little extra nudge towards sustainable services that last.  



It was also determined that impact weighting for different outcomes and milestones might prove useful, along the lines of DFID’s revised approach to logframes (PDF) (though Triple-S is looking to move away from a linear/tabular format and towards more mind mapping and video).  

What was interesting to me about the retreat was the fact that none of the data discussed revealed anything incredibly new or surprising to the Triple-S team.  But for some reason, getting a group of people in a room together and setting aside time to specifically discuss progress and obstacles can be extremely effective for getting decisions made…especially if External Learning Facilitators (endearingly referred to as ELFs) are there to help the process along.

IRC has committed to starting their blog in the next week and will soon be posting more resources on their website, including the full report from the Learning Retreat (which will cover much more than I’m able to include here). As for making it easier to find the Triple-S website, you can try to Google it for yourself, but I think they’re still working on this one (unfortunately there’s a clothing company that goes by the same name!), so just in case, the "Water Services that Last" website is here.

Change is hard

By Elise Wach

Elise Wach is currently working with the Impact and Learning team to support the IRC International Water and Sanitataion Centre through a learning process around its Triple-S Initiative 

Penelope Beyon’s blog about failure and learning brings up some interesting and very valid points about the recent attention to failure, evaluation and learning in development. While it is essential (and quite difficult) for the development community to know when their programming is unsuccessful, and admit this, it doesn’t do any good if we don’t then learn from our failures and change our approaches so as not to repeat them.  

But how does change happen?

The IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre is in the middle of a six-year initiative which is attempting to shift the rural water sector away from a one-off infrastructure-based approach towards a Service Delivery Approach; what they term, Sustainable Service Delivery at Scale (Triple-S). How to enact change is exactly what they’re trying to figure out.

For decades, most development organisations and agencies in the rural water sector (like most sectors) did not know about, or did not want to know about, their failures. They were oblivious to the fact that the majority of their boreholes fell into disrepair within five to seven years, or that many were never even used at all.  Without this knowledge, it is easy to see why development organisations and agencies charged ahead with the same unsuccessful approaches.  

However, in a recent round of interviews I conducted with key stakeholders in the sector (as part of the Impact and Learning Team's support to IRC on this initiative),  it was overwhelmingly apparent that now, everyone in the water sector knows that the standard approach to rural water supply has been ineffective and unsustainable. It is common knowledge that the sector has been failing.  

So the rural water sector has overcome that essential, but difficult first hurdle of finding out about and acknowledging failure. 

Source unknown, but widely available

And in the most recent round of interviews, key stakeholders in the sector generally agreed that the discourse at the top – the policy-level – is starting to reflect these revelations.  But funding practices and implementation on the ground seem to have continued relatively unchanged: the same infrastructure-focused, unsuccessful approaches continue to dominate. Why?

Because change is hard.

One interviewee explained, ‘We’ve been engineered to do small-scale piecemeal interventions…so of course shifting to more of a sustainable approach at scale (vis-à-vis financial flows, regulations, norms, and standards) is going to take time.  There will be resistance to change.’

Changing approaches to realising change

To date, IRC ‘s Triple-S initiative has been attempting to accelerate changes within the sector through three main approaches:

• Relationship-led (i.e. using champions to mobilise change)
• Value-led (i.e. leveraging peer pressure and creating coalitions for change)
• Evidence-led (i.e. providing proof that the current approaches don’t work and proof that other ones do)

The initiative has also been exploring the relationships between policy, funding and practice.

This week, IRC and the Impact and Learning team are holding a learning retreat to go over the findings from the most recent round of stakeholder interviews and other evaluation data.  Based on this, IRC may refine its Theory of Change and tweak its approach to help maximise the efficacy of the initiative moving forward. 

We’ll report back on the outcomes of that learning retreat next week.

In the meantime, a final thought. If more development actors followed a similar approach to IRC (i.e. if they thought through Theories of Change for their approaches and periodically revised them based on real-time evaluations and analysis), it’s not unrealistic to think that the way we work in ‘development’ would be quite different. That is, the phenomenon that Penelope termed as ‘reinventing broken wheels’ might not be as common. Change is hard, but not impossible, and it is certainly needed.

Are we reinventing broken wheels? Let’s talk about the ‘F’ word

By Penelope Beynon

A common saying goes "The only real failure in life is the failure to try."  I disagree.

I think the worst failure in life (and in knowledge brokering) is the repetition of an established mistake. That is to say, the worst failure is the failure to learn.

In recent months, I have come across an increasing number of websites, discussions and articles that almost celebrate failure, in an effort to foster a culture of sharing and learning from others’ mistakes. The Engineers Without Borders (EWB) website Admitting Failures is a good example. In their own words:

"By hiding our failures, we are condemning ourselves to repeat them and we are stifling innovation. In doing so, we are condemning ourselves to continue under-performance in the development sector.

Conversely, by admitting our failures – publicly sharing them not as shameful acts, but as important lessons – we contribute to a culture in development where failure is recognized as essential to success."

While I agree with the premise, often times it is not fully realised.

Image from: http://st-anley.blogspot.com

Ironically, perhaps, several of the ‘failures’ admitted on the EWB website are, in fact, examples of people’s failure to learn from past mistakes – their own and those of others. That is, they are reinventing broken wheels, sometimes under the guise of 'innovation'.



Innovation is important for progress, and with innovation comes a certain level of risk. But I think these risks need to be calculated and one of the key considerations should be a thorough investigation of whether this particular experiment is truly an innovation or whether it has already been tested elsewhere. That is, an honest commitment to learning before doing as well as learning after doing. I hear the echo of Catherine’s recent blog where challenges knowledge brokers to practice what they preach .

Lessons identified or lessons learnt? 

Learning is a big theme for the Impact and Learning Team at IDS  and we have recently been thinking a lot about the difference between a lesson identified and a lesson learned.

In our view, a lesson is only really 'learned' when the implications of the lesson are acted upon. Far too often we see After Action Reviews and evaluation documents that recite from their own experience ‘lessons’ that are insights long established internally and already documented in the experience of others (e.g. developing partnerships takes time, communication matters, etc.). Very seldom does anyone pick up that the worst failure here was not the failure to communicate but the failure to identify ahead of time that communication matters and to learn from others’ experiences about how to do it well.

One outstanding example of a lesson that was learned (albeit the hard way) is retold by Lieven Claessen, a researcher from the International Potato Centre (CIP),s  in two short videos produced the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)'s ICT-KM programme.

In the first video, Claessens identifies the lessons by bravely telling a rather sobering story about his failure to communicate research findings in a way that people likely to be affected could understand and use for decision making. Had the findings of his 2007 research been acted on, the devastating effects of the 2010 mudslides in Eastern Uganda could have been mitigated, potentially saving the lives of hundreds of people and the livelihoods of hundreds more.  In his second video, Claessens evidences his learning by telling how he has changed his approach and commitment to communicating research to ensure he does not repeat this same mistake.

I find Claessens' story deeply moving for two reasons.

Firstly, I take my hat off to anyone who owns up to their part in a failure with such devastating consequences. Especially where that failure could as easily have been passed off to someone else.

Secondly, I find the story unique in its clarity about the link between research communication and wellbeing outcomes. Or, in this case failure to communicate research and negative outcomes. Often that link is much less clear for knowledge brokering. In fact, just as it is difficult (if not impossible) to evidence attribution of development outcomes to knowledge brokering work, it is equally difficult (if not impossible) to evidence negative development outcomes to failure in the same area. Perhaps this provides something of a safety net that allows us to distance ourselves from consequences, or maybe it is one of the reasons that it is apparently so hard to talk about failure in the knowledge brokering arena.

How can we make research communications stickier?

Guest Post: 
James Georgalakis, Communications Manager at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS)

James looks back on 2011 and reflects on the most-viewed news stories about IDS research, featured on the IDS website. Here are his thoughts on what made them popular:

Image from: http://serenelyfull.blogspot.com

Which were the "stickiest" stories on the Institute of Development Studies’ (IDS) website in 2011? Is the use of SEO (search engine optimisation) techniques cheating? And do we improve research impact by dropping in the names of royals and celebrities? Just some of the questions I try and answer in this end of year blog.

News or blogs on development research are highly unlikely to compete with viral YouTube sensations involving celebrities or pets that reach millions in hours. But a quick scan through the top ten most viewed news stories from the IDS web site from 2011 still tells us a lot about what it is that makes some research communication super sticky.

In fact, some IDS news stories were so sticky they came top of the 2011 list even though they were not even posted in 2011. For example, a story about Ian Scoones’ book on Zimbabwe’s land reform, posted in November 2010, came in at number one followed closely by Andy Sumner’s New Bottom Billion, also a 2010 story.What did these stories have that others did not? Well of course exciting, original research helps!

Both of these examples tick that box. Scoones’ revelation that Zimbabwe’s land reforms were not so bad after all quickly ignited a lively media debate that has just run and run. It was still running a year on with this BBC Radio 4 documentary looking closely at his claims. Sumner’s startling findings on the changing nature of poverty also ignited debate in the media and academia and stoked up the blogosphere. This is why web traffic just keeps on finding its way back to the original web stories.

However, not all of our top ten scorers from this year were about original research with counterintuitive findings.

Consider our official number one story from 2011 (the most page views of all the stories actually posted in that year). It is news of a special conference celebrating the work and ideas of IDS Research Associate, Robert Chambers, with links to all the related materials.

This is not hard news and it is not particularly surprising or controversial. Instead, what we have here is the awesome stickiness of a big, well stellar, name in the development research community. How often is Chambers’ name googled? How big are the networks of people who have shared the link with one another and will have flocked to access this content? How quickly did news of his conference spread across the blogosphere with links back to the original content?

Robert Chambers was not the only big name to make the IDS top ten. At number two we have Kate Middleton and Prince William who, according to the IDS headline from last April, ‘got engaged in Africa’s land grab hotspot’.

Yes that’s right! We took the convergence of a royal wedding, the happy couple’s obscure connection with land grabs and a recent IDS hosted academic conference on land grabbing to produce something really sticky. Just think how many royal wedding fans inadvertently became informed on the land grab issue. Such are the rewards of working in research communications.

To be fair to the Future Agricultures Consortium, who organised the International Conference on Global Land Grabbing, this is a pretty sticky topic even without royal endorsement. It features in no less than three of our top ten spots from 2011.

The tactic of using highly topical and sticky words or names in your headline is known as search engine optimisation (SEO) or cheating, and it works. When used well, SEO means that big search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing will list the relevant link(s) to your website in their first page, increasing the likelihood of people clicking on your links.

Of course topicality is itself one of the greatest assets of all. Just take the Arab uprisings or the Horn of Africa crisis which both, perhaps not surprisingly, made our top ten.

However, as any newspaper sub-editor will tell you: if all else fails you just need a great headline.

What else can explain a story about a podcast from an IDS Sussex Development Lecture coming in at number eight? Don’t get me wrong it was a really great (and packed out) lecture but a story about a podcast!

It was titled: ‘Decline of the NGO Empire – where next for international development organisations?’ Pretty good huh? Yes, it was one of mine. Also very nice, (and not one of mine) and slipping in at number ten is: ‘Taking the scare out of scarcity - how faulty economic models keep the poor poor’. See what we did there?

Now I know the whole subject of web traffic drivers and SEO is way more complicated than this.

Our study of the IDS top ten has severe limitations. Clearly content published early in the year has an advantage over the stories that came after and some of our high scorers were boosted by extended periods on the IDS home page. Plus it is about push as well as pull and for that we have to start thinking about the role of social media, where content is positioned on the site and a multitude of other factors.

This is another blog for another day, but my point is this: if you want lots of people to find the story about your research irresistible consider this 2011 IDS top ten. Methodologically sound and original research is great, but a crowd pulling name, timeliness, a big surprise and a great title all help a lot too.

If you want to know more about this stickiness business I suggest you read Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath which should be a compulsory text for all those working in research communications.

Happy holidays!
James Georgalakis, Communications Manager, IDS

And here is that 2011 IDS website news stories top 10 in full (listed by order of unique page views to date):

1. Revolutions in development reflecting forwards from the work of Robert Chambers
2. Prince William and Kate Middleton engaged in Africa’s land grab hotspot
3. Bellagio Initiative starts an IDS led global debate exploring the future of philanthropy and international development
4. Debating the global land grab
5. How a citizen led approach can transform aid to governance
6. The East African food crisis beyond drought and food aid
7. Experts warn of new scramble for Africa at an international conference on land grabbing
8. Decline of the ngo empire – where next for international development organisations?
9. The people revolt why we got it wrong for the Arab world
10. Taking the scare out of scarcity - how faulty economic models keep the poor poor

Think before you jump (into the social media ocean)

By Emilie Wilson

In the last few months, I’ve been reading and following debates about the use and impact of social media, especially blogging, so where better to share my findings and reflections than in this blog...

First, a spate of recent research and surveys on use and impact of social media in the development sector

The Global Development Network (GDNet) has recently published a review of the use of social media (or not) for research collaboration amongst southern academics. As a network comprising of more than 8,000 researchers worldwide, GDNet should be commended for not jumping onto the social media bandwagon without doing some homework around relevance and appropriateness for its members first.

Findings seem to show that, while there are regional and gender differences, the levels of up-take amongst academics is generally low. Barriers for adoption include poor infrastructure or equipment (still), usability, time and perceived value or credibility of the tools as well as lack of institutional incentives. Sound familiar?




Accessed from: http://pedagogy.cwrl.utexas.edu/

 In the global North, the development sector (at least when it comes to aid agencies, NGOs and think tanks) is well and truly on the social media bandwagon. In the last couple of months, Devex published Top 10 Development Groups on Social Media, Vodafone’s World of Difference charity recommended Top 10 Development blogs, and the Guardian highlighted 20 blogs in its Global Development Blogosphere.

Those engaged in social media seem to range from individuals (activists, aid workers or academics) to small groups with shared interests to institutions who have a clearly articulated ‘social media strategy’.

This has prompted some thinking around sustainability and impact.

Following the closing down of established and popular blogs, such as AidWatch, Duncan Green, who writes the popular From Poverty to Power blog, recently speculated on whether the blogging bubble was about to burst. However, when considering whether to wind down his own blog, Duncan came up with some good reasons to keep it going. Some were personal: “blogging forces you to read stuff more carefully and come to a view”, others aspirational “blogging has turbocharged a part of the development discussion best described as the ‘ideas space’”.

The blogosphere as an epistemic community

Duncan’s personal reflections are corroborated in a recent paper by David McKenzie and Ben Őzler on The Impact of Economic Blogs (PDF). This is a substantive attempt at collecting evidence around the following questions:
1. Do blogs improve dissemination of working papers or journal articles?
2. Do they raise the profile of their creators?
3. Do they cause changes in attitudes among their readers or lead to increased knowledge?

It seems that their evidence shows positive results:

• Blogging has a significant impact on abstract views and paper downloads
• Regular blogging is strongly and significantly associated with being more likely to be viewed as a favourite economist
• A majority of readers have read a new economics paper as a result of a blog posting, and more policy-oriented respondents say that blogs are having an influence on how people feel about the effectiveness of particular policies

This latter finding chimes well with a recent survey conducted by SmartAid, which asked respondents, amongst other questions, why they read [development] blogs.

This was their encouraging response.


Graph accessed from: http://findwhatworks.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/blog-survey-findings-5-why-the-audience-reads-blogs/


A full break-down can be found on Dave Algoso’s blog, Find What Works, and makes for some interesting perusal.

Phew! It’s all a good reason to keep blogging then!

However, in case we bloggers start to take ourselves too seriously, I wanted to share a view on blogging from the McKenzie and Őzler paper which I found amusing, but I hope no one who reads this thinks it applies to Impact and Learning...

“a largely harmless outlet for extrovert cranks and cheap entertainment for procrastinating office workers” (Bell, 2006)

Post-Script: do you write a blog? What do you do to measure influence and impact of your blog?