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.

When policy actors engage with the internet, what do they actually do?

By Simon Batchelor

Ever wondered what those serious men and women who describe themselves as involved in policymaking actually use the internet for?

From our study of 360 policy actors across 4 countries, Ehtiopia, Nepal, India and Ghana, the graph below shows the percentage of the whole sample undertaking certain actions on the internet.

Unsurprisingly, almost all policy actors engage with the internet for emails. As you can see from the graph, over 80% download official forms, obtain information from public authorities’ websites and read or download newspapers or online news. A majority undertake the remaining options Instant Messaging, internet communities, video and audio podcasts, uploading self-created content and seeking health-related information. Just under half have telephoned over the internet.

Yet, when you compare these responses, coming from a wide variety of actors in the global South, some of whom have quite poor connectivity, to that pioneer of internet engagement, the USA, you find that their internet use is almost same as that of the average American household! According to recent Pew Research Center on households in the USA, 92% read email, or use a search engine, 76% read online news and 65% use social networking. Only 24% of USA households have used Voice of Internet (PDF link) – so in this case the policy actors are ahead in their use than the average US household.

Are differences still about connectivity?

There are of course differences across the countries not captured by the above graph. We would expect the use of the internet to relate to the connectivity of the country, and to some extent this is what we see in our findings. According to the 2011 ICT Development Index (IDI) (PDF), undertaken by the International Telecommunication Union, Ethiopia ranks 150th, Nepal 134th, Ghana 120th and India 116th - out of a total of 154 countries covered by the index. (We also speculated that connectivity in the South of India was better than the North, and divided our sample accordingly.)

In the graph above we see that telephoning over internet (VOIP), which demands good connectivity, follows our understanding of the connectivity of the countries surveyed. Ethiopia with its poor connectivity makes telephoning a difficult option even for those on the best connectivity the country can provide. Whereas in South India it has now become common across most respondents to use the internet for telephoning (80%).

Data around obtaining information from public authorities’ websites also follows levels of connectivity at the country level, with the exception of Ethiopia. The unusual high use seems to be explained from other data as being about ‘formality’ and need to know official government positions.

However, not all behaviours are best explained by connectivity. When we consider instant messaging and uploading video – which other data suggests are emergent behaviours more dependent on early adoption  – there is no significant difference between countries. Whereas for the use of emails, while there is some difference between countries, the overwhelming uptake makes such differences of no practical meaning.

Finally just considering early adopters; unsurprisingly early adopters have a higher use on Telephoning over the Internet, video calls (via webcam), entertainment, videos or audio podcasts and ‘uploading self-created content to be shared’. We didn’t dare ask these senior policy actors what entertainment they were accessing!

So why should we be interested in this? 

We often talk as though policy actors are a unique species, that because they are such important people, they behave in a unique way. To me the data suggests they are human as the rest of us when it comes to communication and information-seeking behaviours. They use the internet in much the same way as the average UK and USA household uses it. And there is a spread of use, in the same way we see a spread of use among US households. Some have invested in new technologies (see my earlier post on the adoption of Tablet PCs) and some of them are early adopters, just as some households are early adopters. Policy actors seem to demonstrate a spread of human interest in the new communication tools in much the same way as a population with wealth and access might show.

When I first came to IDS I wondered whether ‘policy actors’ in countries of poor connectivity would ever push the Facebook button on a webpage or use instant chat for a helpdesk. I thought that perhaps some of our efforts using the latest communications technologies were a little too North-centric, and that policy actors in the South might be left cold.

However, our research suggests otherwise. My scepticism has been duly quashed.

Reflections on the K* summit: beyond K-Star-wars?

By Catherine Fisher

It was only a matter of time before someone made the KStarWars joke at the K* Conference that took place at the end of April in Canada. I’m only sorry it wasn’t me!

However, the K* Conference was notable not for its battles, but for the sense of commonality that emerged among the participants and for the momentum for future action it generated. 


The K* summit aimed to connect practitioners working across the knowledge-policy-practice interfaces to advance K* theory and practice. Its aim was to span the different sectors and contexts and different terms under which this kind of work is undertaken, for example Knowledge Mobilisation (KMb), Knowledge Sharing (KS), Knowledge Transfer and Translation (KTT).  Hence K*:  an umbrella term that attempts to bypass terminology discussions. 

This blog post provides links to some of the great reporting from the event, acknowledges some of the critiques that the event raised and points to the next steps for K*.    

• K* about process not outcome (blog link)

The opening presentation highlighted how K* is about supporting processes of exchange and engagement between knowledge-policy-practice interfaces not the achievement of particular outcomes. It was great to hear this point made by John Lavis, who has something of a guru status in K* in health. Other important points were about learning about context and what that means, not just saying its important!

• K* about shining a light on multiple sources of knowledge (video link)

Another great metaphor courtesy of Charles Dhewa. The importance of multiple knowledges, knowledge hierarchies and the role of K* actors in helping to facilitate interactions between those knowledges was a recurring theme. E.g. see video by Laurens Klerxx talking about multiple knowledges and innovation brokers. 

• Transnational comparison of K* practices (video link) 

As David Phipps explains in this video, participants from Canada, Ghana and Argentina were able to find considerable commonalities in their work with communities. This transnational comparison may be familiar to those of us who work in international development but it was a first for many of the Canadian participants who are doing really interesting work, for example, in government ministries or communities. I think this points to a strength of the K* movement in connecting people that might not otherwise talk.

• Exploring the range of K* work and how the different pieces of K* work fit together (video link)

The conference illustrated the range and scope of K* work. For example, Jacquie Brown, National Implementation Research Network who works helping communities to implement science, has learnt how this piece fits within the broader scope of K*.  For me, this seeing how different kinds of K* roles are played and how they intersect is important.  

In this video, I share some of my reflections at the time: brokering in the Canadian context including an  examples of brokering at the point of research commissioning:  power dynamics in brokering; and the way that informing role of knowledge brokering is getting a “bum rap” compared to more relational knowledge brokering work. I also get distracted by bangs, crashes and the emergence of breakfast!  

Critiques and the importance of engaging with them

The conference has generated some robust critiques. For example, Enrique Mendizabal sparked a discussion on his blog, On Think Tanks with a range of critiques including whether knowledge brokers are required, how knowledge is shared, and a critique of elitist professionalisation of this field. Scroll to the bottom of his blog post to read the responses, including mine. Meanwhile, Jap Pels argued that the nature of the debate at K* was pretty basic knowledge-sharing stuff.

I think both of these critiques raise interesting points but I think they constitute arguments For K*, not against it. K* recognises that the knowledge work is changing and proliferating, that there is considerable experience and understanding that is not shared across the different spaces in which the role is played. It aims to bring together bodies of expertise (for example that which Jaap Pels points to) to raise the game of all practitioners. It will hopefully provide spaces for debates and engagement with the kinds of critiques that Enrique raises.   

So what next for K*?

The conference generated a range of areas for further collaborative action, and plans for taking the K* initiative goes from here. 

Areas for further collaborative action included:

• Understanding impact: a group agreed to share the tools data collection tools they are already using, I’ll be participating in this group, building on work of Knowledge Brokers Forum
  
• K* in developing countries: a predominantly African group explored the particular dimensions of K* work in their contexts generating a number of action points

A group of participants gathered on Saturday to work out what next for K* as a whole. Consolidation of the K* Green Paper is considered an important next step – co-organiser  Louise Shaxson will be leading this work. There are ideas of developing a more formalised network, which will be led by UNU-INWEH in the first instance.   

UNU, who have led this process so far, remain committed and aim to get the support of the UNU governance. The World Bank has already provided financial support. Support from such international bodies is important as it will embed the international nature of this initiative, it is not without its risks!    


So to borrow again from StarWars, the force is, for now, with K*.  The scale and ambition of the initiative together with some indications of funding and high profile support suggest it has a future. However it faces both practical and fundamental challenges.

Practical challenges include maintaining ownership and momentum on behalf of the largely volunteer force taking it forward for now, identifying its niche and building connections around such a fragmented field of practice.

More fundamental challenges lie in ensuring that it really can generate value that will improve knowledge-policy-practice interfaces, rather than providing a talking shop for elitist actors.   




Catherine Fisher is a member of the K* Conference International Advisory Committee.

Exploring the black box together: evaluating the impact of knowledge brokers

Cartoon by Sidney Harris (2007)

By Catherine Fisher

I love this cartoon! 

It seems to capture the idea of the "black box" that lies between the activities knowledge brokers and intermediaries undertake and the outcomes and impacts they seek to achieve. That’s not to say that they don’t achieve outcomes in the real world, rather that the pathways by which their work brings about change are difficult to unpack and evaluate.

The Knowledge Broker’s Forum (KBF) has started exploring this "black box" of how to evaluate the impact of knowledge brokers and intermediaries in an e-discussion running from 31 October until 9 November. I am (lightly) facilitating this discussion, along with Yaso Kunaratnam from IDS Knowledge Services.

If you would like to participate, you can sign up on the forum's website, it's open to anyone with an interest in this area.

Challenges in evaluating impact

We know there are a lot of challenges to evaluating impact of knowledge brokering. Some challenges stem from the processes (psychological, social and political) in which knowledge and information bring about change, the contested nature of the relationship between research and better development results, and the challenges of identifying contribution to any changes in real world contexts. This is particularly challenging for actors that seek to convene, facilitate and connect rather than persuade or influence.

As well as these quite high level challenges, there are the very practical issues around lack of time and resources to dedicate to effectively understanding impact. These challenges are explored in a background paper (PDF) I prepared as food for thought for those taking part in the e-discussion.

Being an e-discussion amongst 400+ knowledge brokers from all over the world, I am not sure yet where discussions will go, but I am hoping that it will shed some light on the following areas:

Breadth and depth of impact and outcomes  

How far do people go to identify ultimate outcomes of knowledge brokering work? I feel we can certainly go beyond immediate impact (e.g. personal learning) to push towards what that resulted in, however I wonder if it is meaningful to start looking at human development and wellbeing indicators. It will be interesting to see how far others are going.

Understanding behaviour change

If knowledge brokering is about behaviour changes that ensure greater engagement with research evidence, how are people defining those behaviour changes and are how are they measuring them? Are we too easily impressed with stories of information use when these could in fact hide some very poor decision-making behaviours?

Opportunities for standardisation of approaches and data collection

If people have come up with ways of doing this, is there any appetite for standardising approaches to enable greater comparison of data between different knowledge brokering initiatives? This would help us build a greater understanding of the contribution of knowledge brokers beyond the scope of any one broker’s evaluation.

I’ll also be interested to explore and challenge some of my assumptions – in particular that building some kind of theory or map of change is an important starting point for defining and then seeking to evaluate impact. This has been discussed previously on this blog and is a hot topic at the moment.

Our discussion will face challenges – not least the huge variety of types of knowledge brokering and contexts in which it is undertaken may mean there is not enough common interest. But I am sure that there is a lot of experience in the group that can be brought to bear on these questions and, in 10 days time, we will have a better idea of what is known, who is keen to explore this further and and hopefully how we could move forward to develop our understanding in this area.

Early headlines from research on policy makers and ICTs: "persistent and curious enquirers" (with smartphones)

By Simon Batchelor

Just to keep you up to date on the country studies that I mentioned in my first blog….(in which I spoke about research we were conducting on policy makers and their use of ICTs).... a lot of data is in. Some countries found it easier to get interviews with senior policy makers than others, so some countries have still to deliver their full quota.

However we have now begun analysis and we begin to find some interesting headlines. As I write, my colleagues Jon Gregson and Manu Tyagi are presenting some headlines back to a portion of the intermediary sector in India and Nepal, and Chris Barnett presented last week in Ghana.  I would like to acknowledge the work of our partners ODC Inc in Nepal, and Delink Services  in Ghana.

So what are some of those headlines?

We will upload the slideshare soon, but in brief here are some of the things that attracted my attention:-

Policy actors have access to ICT, and a considerable number of them have smartphones, and to my mind more importantly, know how to use them!

Image from: http://bestsmartphone2011.info/

Of course they almost all have access to computers and the internet, and cellphones.  But Ghana 52%, Nepal 49% and North India 35% of the samples have smartphones.  In Ghana 25% had more than one smartphone!  And of those that have a smartphone, almost all in Ghana and Nepal have explored sending emails, surfing in the internet on the phone, recording a video and instant messaging.  Only in North India did it seem that there were a significant portion of people who had a smartphone and yet did not explore these ‘features’ (about 50%).

What does this mean to us in the intermediary sector? It suggests that if you are developing an app to push research into the policy environment, then the baseline of smartphone use is there.

Policy actors are surfing the internet themselves – the idea that policy makers wait for an assistant to brief them seems to be diminishing.  

In all three countries, the majority of policy makers agreed with statements surrounding their own use of ICT and surfing the internet.  They described themselves as ‘a "persistent and curious" enquirer’ and noted that they ‘often "discover" other relevant information when searching’ (Phrases used by the PEW Internet studies in USA).  They also agreed to a lesser extent with ‘I tend to get my briefings face to face officially, in meetings’.  In Ghana, where there was a significant portion of private sector executives, there were a significant number who actually disagreed with the idea that they got their information from ‘official briefings’.

What does this mean to us in the intermediary sector? It suggests that policy actors are looking for information themselves, and, I presume, therefore need to find it easily, in an accessible form, and I guess, quickly.  

Yes, I know that searching for information online is evolving, and that social networks now tend to push information within the network.  This changes the way those of us who are well connected get our information.  We did investigate whether the policy actors are connected to social media networks and to some extent looked at their searching behaviours, but we are not there yet in the analysis to be able to comment on it.  Watch this space.

Policy actors do have an appetite for research – or at least they say they do 

There was a consistent strong agreement with the need for facts and figures, and that these need to be up to date.  We explored what information they were actually looking for and we looked at whether they trust the sources and channels for the information.  Again, these details will come out as the analysis proceeds.  However there was an interesting difference between the three countries.  In India there is a strong trust for ‘local research’ (as opposed to international research), however in Ghana  and Nepal they rate international research much higher than local research.
 
What does this mean to us in the intermediary sector ? In our MK4D programme, we are working on the idea that local intermediaries understand the context of research and policy in their location, and therefore have a strong ground with which to communicate research to policy makers. However, we also work with the idea of ‘co-construction’ working alongside and with our colleagues in the South.   If ‘local research’ is trusted less by policy actors, then that would seem to endorse the approach of co-construction – where local and international bodies work together to provide quality insights.   It also suggests that our programme to support the exposure of research published in the South onto the global internet is heading in the right direction.

Anyway, those are some insights from the first week of analysis.  More to come.

Rethinking development in an age of scarcity and uncertainty

By Emilie Wilson

Last week, I was in York attending the European Association of Development Institutes (EADI) and the Development StudiesAssociation (DSA) joint conference, whose thematic focus is the title of this blog.

Downloadable from www.ids.ac.uk

There is something in the word "rethinking" which might suggest an attitude of "it's broken, let's go back to the drawing board and start again". IDS used the term "reimagining", which has a more inspirational and creative resonance to it, when developing research around exploring and responding to crises, the results of which have been captured in the latest IDS Bulletin.

From my experience at the conference, the broad assembly of academics, activists and policymakers reflected a spectrum of  approaches to "rethinking": from the radicals who want to upend the existing financial, governance and informational infrastructure on which development sits, the innovators who modify and improve on existing systems,  the philosophers who want to ask uncomfortable questions about the ethics of giving to poor countries over poor people or the politics of measurement, and the pragmatists who want solutions and answers to the problems they perceive..

The approach I try to bring to “rethinking” is one of learning: reflecting on past and current theories and practices, identifying areas of improvement and opportunities for innovation, and sharing this experience more widely. Hence the blog I wrote for the conference entitled “Let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water”.

As I say in this blog, I found the definition of Knowledge by Dr Sebastiao Mendonco Ferreira fascinating.  He contrasted the practice of managing knowledge as a resource with managing natural resources.  This was a useful way to focus our minds on ‘knowledge’, rather a slippery word, like an intellectual game of charades or a riddle ‘it’s intangible, non-rivalrous, non-erodible, human-made, both tacit and explicit, contained in receptacles such as human minds or embedded in machines, it’s unlimited’….would you have arrived at ‘knowledge’ after this description?

He went on to highlight the role of the internet for Knowledge ecosystems :- Will this increasingly custom-made and intuitive ‘web-environment’ help us develop the epistemic cultures and communities? Sebastiao suggests we need to address our limited ability to ‘absorb’ knowledge? A knowledge which is increasingly complex and sophisticated, and thus difficult to verify? This is one approach that IDS has taken through its development of a social networking platform for people working in development, Eldis Communities.

Read the rest of the original post.

You might also be interested in my colleague Yaso Kunaratnam’s post on: Rethinking the role of intermediaries in bridging policy, research and practice