Laying the foundations of a knowledge sharing network

By Catherine Fisher

AfricaAdapt is a knowledge sharing network on climate change adaptation in Africa. My colleague Blane Harvey and I recently published a paper that shares insights from its first phase of operation.   Entitled  “Behind the Scenes at a ClimateChange Knowledge Sharing Network: IDS Insights from Phase One of AfricaAdapt”, it explores the dynamics of design and implementation of a knowledge sharing network in a distributed partnership, from the perspective of the former lead partner.

The paper identifies insights across a range of areas, from governance and managing financial resources to capacity building and learning that we hope will be useful to others thinking of setting up a similar knoweldge sharing network.   Here I focus on one theme that emerged  around building mutual understandings and the importance of inception and set up meetings.  I also share a few practical ideas that didn't make it into the paper. 

Importance of exploring and constructing meaning

One theme that emerged in that paper is the importance of establishing understandings that will underpin effective collaboration at the beginning of partnerships. This includes exploring more theoretical understandings about concepts (such as knowledge) as well as practical understandings about planning and communication.  We argue that time spent on exploring understandings is important for a range of reasons, not least to help prevent the lead organisation dominating the construction of meaning within the partnership.

Using inception phases to explore understanding

Inception and set-up phases and meetings provide the opportunity to explore understandings, harnessing differences in opinion and perspective to best effect. However inception and set-up meetings are generally very action-orientated and focus on identifying what is to be done by whom.   The insights in the working paper point to the importance of also exploring why and how activities are undertaken as part of creating a knowledge sharing network.
  
Practical suggestions for inception meetings

The table below provides a few suggestions of questions to explore before (or at the beginning of a process) establishing a knowledge sharing network, and ideas of processes that could be used to explore them.  I have used some of these approaches but not all and  this should not be taken as “best” or even “good” practice. Instead I hope it will be food for thought about ways of addressing some of the issues raised in the paper.

Hope you enjoy the full paper and, if you are planning to set up a knowledge sharing network in partnership, that the following ideas are useful input to any inception or set up meetings.

Questions to explore	Suggestions on process
How do we understand key concepts?	Explore understandings of key concepts by individually completing the phrase “Knowledge is…” (repeating for other concepts  eg “knowledge sharing is...”, “communicationis...”, “participation is..."). First by writing it down then moving around to compare with others.  Reflect together as a group on similarities and differences.
What’s the purpose of this network?	Revisit the purpose and logic of the network exploring questions such as: What is the problem this network is seeking to address? Who are the stakeholders? What will be different for them if this is a success?  Outcome based planning tools such as Outcome Mapping or Theory of Change approaches could help.
What are our motivations and expectations?	Facilitate a discussion that asks participants to share: What I hope to gain from involvement What my organisation hopes to gain What I/my organisation expects to contribute What I/my organisation expects others to contribute
What’s the organisational context in which we will deliver this?	Use creative ways such as metaphor or pictures to explore organisational culture and values (e.g. if my organisation was a machine/animal/season/colour it would be..).   Draw organagrams (from memory) of each organisation, including people outside the organisation that might affect the network.  Compare with each other
How will we actually deliver this?	Explore what each organisation thinks they will be contributing on an ongoing basis and how they will do it.    For example describe “A day in the life of a KSO”
How will we make decisions?	Explore scenarios of different decisions from big decisions such as adopting a new partner to small such as adding an item to a website/newsletter.  Who would be involved?
How will we work together?	Identify what existing experience partners already have of working in partnership.  One approach could be sharing stories about highs or lows of partnership working.  What kinds of partnership do they have, how is this similar or different, what works and what doesn’t?    Consider generating principles and strategies for working together, including  communication methods and etiquette.
What do we expect of the lead partner?	Explore what power does the lead organisation have vis a vis the other organisations? How can this be balanced? What responsibilities does it have?
What do we do if things go wrong?	Build scenarios of what could go wrong. Explore different ideas of “wrong” then discuss how it could be addressed. Relate to principles for working together.
How will we learn in this process?	Explore what approaches to learning and professional development each organisation has.   Look at simple models for learning such as “experiential learning cycle” and see how they can apply to the partnership.  Think about how to learn before and during the process looking at methods such as After Action Reviews, peer assists etc
How will we monitor and evaluate our work?	Discuss understandings of M&E (which are often very different), partners’ experience of it, and what they expect to contribute.

Catherine Fisher was Capacity Support Coordinator for the Impact and Learning Team at IDS. She left IDS at the end of September 2012 to join Amnesty International as their new International Capacity Building Co-ordinator

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.

Can a policy brief be an effective tool for policy influence?

By Catherine Fisher


Popular wisdom suggests that busy policy makers don’t want to read dense academic journal articles or books. Instead they want something short that summarises findings into accessible language and draws out the main implications. Consequently, policy briefs; short jargon-free summaries of research findings, have become an increasingly popular tool for researchers trying to achieve policy influence. So popular that a in a recent discussion on the Knowledge Brokers Forum, Nasreen Jesani, commented "there is policy brief fever…. People feel like it is the silver bullet and so there is an upsurge of policy brief creation."

Yet, anyone who has tried to produce one will know that policy briefs can be time consuming and expensive to create and disseminate, and study by IDRC Think Tank Initiative (pdf) raised questions about their popularity with policy makers


So how effective are policy briefs at influencing beliefs and prompting people to act differently?

Penelope Beynon from the Impact and Learning Team joined forces with others at IDS, 3ie,and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) to try to find out. The team used a randomised control design to explore three research questions:

• Do policy briefs influence readers?
• Does the presence of an op-ed type commentary within the brief lead to more or less influence?
• Does it matter if the commentary is assigned to a well known name in the field?

And it is this last question where IDS Director Lawrence Haddad bravely stepped in to test what has described as “the Haddad effect”. Did having his name onthe commentary make a difference?

Full details of the study findings and methodology

Download summary of study findings (PDF)

Download full report (PDF)

Key findings

Funnily enough, the study did not find that policy briefs are a "silver bullet". However, the findings are striking and have implications for how communication experts design policy briefs and how we evaluate research communication. The study found that:

• The policy brief was more effective in creating 'evidence-accurate' beliefs amongst those with no prior opinion than among those who already held an opinion

• Messengers matter when it comes to readers' intended actions: the authority (Haddad) effect influenced likelihood of taking certain actions but not on beliefs

• Gender and self-perceived levels of influence affect people’s intention to act after reading the policy brief : women were less likely to report that they would act differently after reading the brief.

The report offers some recommendations for those creating policy briefs. In particular they recommend including opinion and authority features as they may help to ensure briefs are shared and passed on. They also suggest that the startling difference in response to the brief between men and women in the study should be investigated further.

The authors have acknowledged the methodological limitations of the study, not least that a policy brief is rarely consulted in isolation. However this study is a contribution towards understanding the effectiveness of different approaches to communicating research.

It is important for those involved in trying to strengthen the connections between research and policy to think about the tools they are using and the change that they are trying to effect. As research uptake becomes increasingly important we need to invest more in understanding what works and how we can meaningfully test that.


This study is a contribution to that important debate, let us know what you think.

Comments on this study:
Is there a "Haddad" effect? Results from a randomised controlled trial Lawrence Haddad
Should think tanks write policy briefs? What an RCT can tell us Jeff Knezovitch 
Summary of e-discussion on policy briefs and information needs of decision-makers Yaso Kunaratnam on KBF

Do policymakers in the South text more than talk?

By Simon Batchelor

In a news story today on the BBC website, the headline reads “Texting overtakes talking in UK, says Ofcom study”.  The article states that “While 58% of people communicated via texts on a daily basis in 2011, only 47% made a daily mobile call, [according to the UK's] communications industry regulator [Ofcom].”

As readers of this blog will know, we have been conducting our own study in 6 countries on the information ecosystem* of policy actors.  You can find our previous blogs, here and here.

While we asked participants in the study about what ICT technology they owned, how frequently they used the Internet, how they searched for information, and so on, we did not ask them specifically about their preferred form of mobile phone use (texting or talking).  However, the Ofcom report which prompted the BBC news story, focuses on much more than texting – in fact, it covers very similar set of questions to our own study (indeed we used the Pew US studies to help shape our own study).

For example, UK Ofcom report states that “39% of (UK) adults now own a smartphone, a 12% increase on 2010.”  How does this compare with policy actors in the South? The graph below shows that of our sample of 100 actors in each country, a similar proportion have at least one smartphone. In fact some people have more than one, since cross network calls are often expensive enough that it makes it worth carrying two phones to keep call costs down.  This is particularly true of say Ghana, where several respondents had 2 or 3 smartphones.

The UK report also states that “Tablet ownership is also on the rise, with 11% owning such a device, up from 2% last year.”  Interestingly as this blog showed, Tablet ownership among policy actors is at an equivalent level – currently at about 15% (from the updated data set). We concluded in that blog that this ownership of technology suggests that information intermediaries seeking to get evidence in front of policy actors in order to inform their decisions, should indeed be using these channels.

The Ofcom report also offers detail on internet behaviour of UK households – contrasting the behaviour of 16 to 24 year olds with others. Of course, in our study we didn’t have many 16–24 year olds as we were interviewing those in leadership and management positions.  However we did note that the younger respondents tended to do more with their smartphones and tablets than older respondents – with the exception of where older respondents let their children play with their phones. Where this occurred, the older respondents themselves had as good a knowledge of the more tricky smartphone activities such as downloading an app, or uploading a video, as the younger respondents. 

And finally the Ofcom report states that “Two thirds of internet users have accessed Facebook.”.  From our preliminary data almost 70% of our respondents have accessed internet communities. Keeping in mind that actually there are alternative social networks to Facebook on the world scene (hard to believe!), this again shows an equivalent figure. What is much more surprising from our data is that nearly 60% of those who have smartphones have accessed social networks from their phones. Unfortunately, the Ofcom report doesn’t say how people access their social network. 

Conclusion?  As we have previously noted in our work, the respondents to our survey show that technology use among policy actors in the South pretty much mirrors the average household in USA (Pew Internet and American Life Project research). With this Ofcom report on UK behaviour, we can see that our research findings also appear to mirror technology use in the UK.   

If this is so, (and this is where I am speculating) then perhaps it is reasonable to assume that the details of how people surf might also be true?  For instance, Ofcom report that “With two-thirds of internet users on Facebook, it generates almost a quarter of all referred traffic to YouTube (23.7%), in contrast to Google’s 32.3%. Facebook also refers traffic to other popular websites: BBC (11.2%), eBay (6.7%), Twitter (3.8%), and Wikipedia (3.6%).”  If policy actors are members of social networking sites, then perhaps Facebook is driving them to sites as much as their own searching of Google. If this is the case, then it becomes all the more important that social networks are used by knowledge intermediaries to bring evidence to the attention of policy actors.

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.