I spoke about our proposed approach to communications and knowledge sharing. You can read about that and download the presentation on the Global Impact Study website. It’s been tough to work out how to do open research — specifically how much to share about process and learning. (So yes my definition of open research includes working transparently, not just sharing findings, instruments, and datasets at the end.) Also it is anxiety-provoking to stop doing the work and write about doing the work. Like I’m doing now!

All of that by way of an excuse… I’m finally sharing this workshop report (download PDF, 4MB). It’s a personal account for those who were not able to attend. I’ve tried to give a sense of the flavor of the meeting and the range of topics and issues that came up. This is a large and complex project, presenting many challenges — from the methodological to the administrative. I did my best not to air dirty laundry, but also not to sanitize what I heard. I hope this document is useful for others as they work on similar projects or in similar domains.

IDRC is one of the funders of the Global Impact Study. When I worked there, I was lucky enough to get sent to training on Outcome Mapping. The training was led by Terry Smutylo. He pulled out his guitar and sang this song: the Output Outcome Downstream Impact Blues. (During a training at a GOVERNMENT development agency — think about that for a minute…) Listen and you’ll see why I think IDRC and Terry are the coolest coolest folks ever. See? They even put the song on their server! Ooops… looks like it’s been removed… good thing I took a screenshot so y’all believe me.

There’s also a powerpoint of the lyrics to Impact Blues.

Contribution, not attribution! After listening you’ll also understand why I find the naming of our study kinda ironic. Chalk one up to diverse opinions within organizations. Amen to that ;)

1. The backend — Clean WordPress install, giving our researchers the ability for our folks to post their own content. They should not have to fight with the system.
2. The audience — Donors are our most important audience in this round. We have to be able to tell our story quickly — who we are, what we’re good at, and what we’ve done — to prove that we’re a good investment.
3. Show off our stuff — We have a lot of great research assets: reports, evidence narratives, briefs, datasets. Make it easy to connect those to people and to project. And make it easy for folks to access them.

Originally number three was me thinking about the best place to store our pubs. Adding them as separate WordPress posts did not feel right. Not robust enough. All sitting in folders by year and month. No no no. Then I thought I’d put them on the iSchool server in a folder called resources. Nope. Too rudimentary. Then I remembered: You are not the only person to have had this problem. Get on google and poke around. Do your homework. What I found is good, really good.

I started by looking for something that would play nice with WordPress, which led me to Joss Winn’s Displaying a dynamic publications list from a repository on a staff profile page.

This in turn tipped me off to the whole world of cloud repositories. Of course. Duh! There are people out there and all they do is manage collections: repositories. Increasingly digital ones. So… from here I found EPrints. Created by the School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton, it appears to be a wonderful open-source application to manage, specifically, open-access repositories. They  have a cloud version and a version you install on your own server. (Did I mention that open research is important to us? Yeah. Well it is. Remember that.) So they are cool three ways:

1. They’re a little consulting shop in an academic department. I’ve worked for two of those. We can be friends.
2. They’ve created an open-source app to manage information.
3. They’re promoting open access.

Plus they were super super well reviewed in this overview by Neil Godfrey and this survey by the Repositories Support Project, an initiative of the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to support the development and growth of a national repositories network. I called EPrints and they were super nice. (JISC, by way, also has a project called Dura, to embed institutional deposit into researchers’ academic workflow. Cooooool…)

MIT’s DSpace also looks pretty cool. IDRC uses it to manage their digital library. I’ll look into them before deciding. But my view with this sort of thing, increasingly, is this: Don’t spend months trying to find the perfect tool. Find a good-enough tool with an import/export feature and get to work!

In February 2010, JISC and Eduserv held Repositories and the Cloud, an event to discuss the policy and technical issues associated with cloud computing and the delivery of repository services in UK universitites. Adrian Stephenson took rocking-good videos. Watch a few to get an sense of what’s going on in this space. (Also note how they used TwapperKeeper to archive and summarize event-related tweets. More on social reporting.)

Okay, so what’s exciting about this and why should you care if you’re in development?

There are several massive repositories now, mostly stovepiped by donor (topic for another post). This has to stop. The model now should be aggregation. The open data model serves us well here: Standards are important. Build systems that can talk to each other and share with each other. Imagine if we could aggregate knowledge assets from a whole host of places.

So why should you care if you’re a development research group or consulting firm?

Or any organization that produces a lot of publications or digital assets? Ohhhh, here’s where it gets really exciting. Some ideas:

• People profiles that automatically update when you post new content to the repository. This is good good news for all you academics out there with beautiful long publications list. You’ll never have to update it again!
• Project descriptions that automatically display related research/project outputs, generated based on fields you’ve defined (see TASCHA’s draft of research project chunks).
• Track downloads of each asset (example).
• RSS feeds to display on various parts of your site.
• RSS feed to share with anyone else, so they can display your latest resources.

See where I’m going with this? Will keep you posted.

Tips before you begin:

• The reader should be able to get the gist of your findings and their implications from reading the title and summary. Since every word counts, so you’ll need to do some careful wordsmithing, writing and re-writing these a few times. You may want to do this part last.
• Language should balance precision and accessibility. Use plain English, avoiding jargon and acronyms. Define obscure terms and explain complex concepts.
• Your research abstract (in the front matter — topic for another post) is a good place to start because you’ve already had to think through what’s most important.
• Remember the purpose: To enable independent, rigorous research to guide policy and practice.
• Briefs are also intended to promote dissemination/downloads of the full research paper and to promote our work.

Format

Two-sided 8.5×11-inch paper. Easy to print from typical black-and-white office printer. Maximum 1000 words.

Topic

Main topic. One or two words. Ideally this should map to your core research areas. Examples: Public Access, Employability, Youth, Disabilities

Country/Region

Insert geographic region

Title

A short, pithy title (8-12 words).

Summary

One or two sentences with main takeaway message: the “so what?” — no more than 30 words.

Background

Describe the social or economic challenge. Tell us about the context. If applicable, describe the program(s). What are we trying to achieve?

Research Design

Describe the methodology, number of people in sample, limitations, etc.

Findings

Summarize your most important findings. Include at least one chart or graph to illustrate. Qualitative research can be illustrated with quotes.

So what?

Policy, program, or research implications. This is the most important section of the brief. What do these findings mean for people making policy or funding decisions? For folks designing programs targeting similar populations? For researchers investigating similar topics or considering using a similar methodology? How can your research make a difference?

Source

Insert the name of the full publication and where folks can get it.

Example:

Pal, J., Freistadt, J., Frix, M., & Neff, P. 2009. Technology for employability in Latin America: Research with at-risk youth & people with disabilities. Seattle: Technology & Social Change Group, University of Washington.

Download the full publication at tascha.washington.edu.

Sponsors

Include sponsor information. After all, it was pretty nice of them to give you all of those thousands (or millions!) of dollars to ask important questions and hang out with cool people. If research is part of a specific project include a sentence or two on that.

Example:

This research was supported by a grant from Microsoft Community Affairs under the Unlimited Potential Community Technology Skills Program.

The Technology & Social Change Group

Include your organizational boilerplate. Here’s ours:

The Technology & Social Change Group (TASCHA) at the University of Washington Information School explores the design, use, and effects of information and communication technologies in communities facing social and economic challenges. With experience in 50 countries, TASCHA brings together a multidisciplinary network of social scientists, engineers, and development practitioners to conduct research, advance knowledge, create public resources, and improve policy and program design. Our purpose? To spark innovation and create more opportunities for those who need it most. To learn more visit tascha.washington.edu.

Copyright & Creative Commons

Make it easy for others to promote and build on your work. Open research rocks! We use something like this:

© The University of Washington. All rights reserved. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

Let me know how this works for you and if you have any questions. Samples would also be cool — I’ll add them here. Or you can leave a comment and email me the file to add to your comment.

I’ve heard this again and again. So, why’s it so hard? I’ve come to suspect that part of it has to do with the structure of communications within organizations. The centralized structure is a problem. We need to figure out how to make a distributed model work (see an early stab at how this could happen for a network or distributed team). You hear all the time about user-generated content. Well how about staff-generated content? Then the communicator becomes facilitator, supporter, curator. No longer struggling to find out what’s going on but rather focused on packaging and outreach.

This also has implications for knowledge sharing (or whatever KM is called these days) and organizational development. It’s about documenting learning, mistakes, victories. Taking the time to stop and think about process.

So as part of this thinking toward a new model I’ve developed (with help from my friends) a list of observations from my last ten or so years of experience. Mostly these are with international development organizations, most of which were implementing research or social change projects. They all had similar characteristics and issues:

• Multi-cultural teams made up of passionate, opinionated researchers and development professionals (read: herding cats)

• Partners who are at other times competitors

• Far-flung teams and partners facing similar issues and or learning things that are relevant to each other’s practice — they have things to share and are hungry for knowledge

• A “boss” (read: donor) who’s not at home — or several absent bosses each with different (sometimes shifting) priorities and stakeholders — so important spend time building understanding, updating, and demonstrating return on investment

• Disincentives to document or openly discuss failure stifles learning and innovation (this is the down side of the performance-based contract)

• Ability to see organizational issues but no way to fix them — Because of the nature of their work (talking with many team members, needing consistent updates, pushing for clarity on audiences, messages, activities) communicators’ work is affected by organizational issues and information flows, yet addressing these is outside of their mandate

• A “core + support” staff structure, where support staff often feel marginalized, their contributions and needs misunderstood or unacknowledged because they don’t do what the organization does (administration, finance, human resources, communications)

• Communicators not invited — and often must lobby — to attend meetings, events, or site visits that would allow them to better understand issues and activities, create richer content, and build relationships that improve information flows
• The staff closest to the work are least likely to communicate, so key information, learning, and stories often remains hidden
• Expectation that communicators can create compelling content from a mix of existing documents: proposals, contracts, presentations, various reports (coded, jargon-laden, sanitized, noisy)
• Communicators not in direct or regular contact with activities or colleagues in the field must use an investigative-journalist approach to dig up stories, which may annoy field staff as they’ve been preparing reports and communicating regularly with project managers

• Little attention or resources dedicated to internal systems (infrastructure + practices)

• Lack of coordination of basic information such as travel, events, and contacts leads to missed opportunities
• Productivity lost finding and re-finding assets
• Little time allocated to reflect on how the organization is working, what can be learned, and how to work better

Have you observed this? What’s the same? What’s different? How do you think these issues can be avoided or overcome? Any ideas for solutions?

Sharing content with empathy. This is a key practice. We must provide sufficient context and metadata in order for our content to be findable and usable.

and

You may also want to add more detailed information to help others create works about similar topics or issues. Documenting who or what is in the picture, why it’s important, and giving a sense of the context will help others immensely. (We like to call this “extending empathy forward”.)

The idea is to make it easier to build on each other’s work.

Then today I heard Nora’s full interview with Ed Burtynsky. There it is again. It also brings up many of the issues around archiving and digital work, which Theresa Rowat has been explaining to me. Theresa is currently the director of the McGill University Archives. She is an amazing. She makes archiving come alive — especially the issues surrounding digital records. I can listen to her for hours. (Seamus Ross summarizes these issues in another conversation with Nora.)

The 10,000-year clock is a project of The Long Now Foundation. Which was part of the inspiration for Neal Stephenson’s book, Anathem. That stayed with me for a number of reasons. One being that I feel like much of what I do is point to ideas and connect them. Not that that’s bad. I like connecting people and ideas. But I’d like to balance it with being able to do some deep thinking of my own.

Sometimes I feel like everything is connected.

Knowledge workers are an investment rather than an expense. They not only desire considerable personal autonomy but also the responsibility and accountability for running at least some part of an organization. They need to be treated as partners or associates and not as typical Industrial Age employees.

I have often felt this. It’s part of why I work freelance. He goes on:

… the more people are given a voice and implicit control in managing a venture, the more the informal networks (present in every entity) will begin to function more in the open and start making appropriate connections with other emergent groups.

Ehin talks about the importance of tacit knowledge. How it’s difficult to access, share, and transfer to others without extensive personal contact and trust. How it’s based on habits and culture that we do not recognize in ourselves. And, most interestingly, how it emerges serendipitously as individuals or small groups confront new or unanticipated situations.

“People must first be surrounded by a supportive environment,” he writes. This is what I’ve been thinking too. This is why building connections and community within the organization matters so much. Why getting internal communications right matters so much. We not only have to do our work — we need to take time every once and a while to reflect on how we’re doing it. Especially in an ever-changing environment.

Ehin’s “organizational sweet spot” represents “the area where the formal and informal systems of an organization have reached “a meeting of the minds” over the fundamental goals, policies and processes of an organization. …What can be managed or adjusted is the organizational context or ecology that surrounds the sweet spot.” Makes me think of the New Institutional Economics. Incentives matter. Institutions matter. Especially the informal ones. Systems, culture, the framework in which we operate.

He goes on to outline two categories of organizational ecologies. I’m paraphrasing here:

• Controlled-Access System — Access to the resources of a group and its activities are controlled by one or a few select individuals. All other members of the organization must first get approval from these executives before any of the assets can be used. Compliance instead of commitment is prized.
• Shared-Access System — The resources of a group and its activities are dealt with by all members of an organization. All organizational members have considerable autonomy in decision-making and in resource allocations. Expert power instead of position power dominates. Emphasis is placed on situational leadership, open book management, and self-organization in solving problems or pursuing opportunities (read: “open organization”).

This example really hit home: “I would like to download a free Web resource which will help me perform my job better, but the IT Department will not allow me to do that.”

Oh boy. That is me. I did it anyway. Sorry about that IT dudes ;)

Example: At the 2007 Telelcentre Leaders Forum, before the Global Knowledge Partnership meeting in Kuala Lumpur, my team of telecentre.org Community Facilitators worked for many hours after a long day of sessions to capture everything. They never complained but it was hard for them to both participate in the Forum and document it. I was also concerned that they were missing out on valuable networking time. After the event, I spent days pulling everything together into a report. Not something I would have been able to do if not my full-time job. Here’s a video of them. (Karim, I don’t know what you’re saying in Arabic but it better be nice!)

OK, enough ranting. (BTW telecentre.org has seriously grown its team of Community Facilitators. Yay!)

The solution? Social Reporting. A way to think ahead and be clear about who owns the the documentation and followup task and what they need to do, while at the same time distributing it to event participants already using social media. Think of it as a mix of better documentation and crowdsourcing.

Make it easy for folks to share — figure out the tag for your event beforehand and publicize it like crazy. You’d be amazed how much information you can get from aggregating microblogs — add in some good blogposts and photos and you’re in business.

I learned about Social Reporting practices from Dave Wilcox. He and Bev Trayner have done some great thinking on this. They’ve created a wiki and a  Social Reporting Toolkit — one of the best-written guides I’ve read. Ever. (Yes, I actually read the whole thing. Can’t wait to use it.) And I see looking through Bev’s site that she’s been busy creating another guide: Learning activities: some communication tools for communities of practice events. Makes me think of some of Bellanet‘s wonderful work.

Final note: As the person who has had to dig though many a folder of unmarked photos (although less now, thanks Flickr + Creative Commons), I think it is important to extend empathy forward. This is the core principle of knowledge sharing; if you don’t document then your event does not exist for those who were not able to attend. And no one can learn from you. So I encourage the people I work with to add basic information to their artifacts — the outputs of documentation — that will enable others to contribute to the conversation and create materials about similar topics or issues. Explaining who or what is in the picture, why it’s important, and giving a sense of the context helps others immensely. This also means reccomending that participants use a Creative Commons license so others can build on their work.

But it seems that donors, sponsors, shareholders, or whatever you call those lovely folks you depend on, love them. Or at least they demand them. Sorta like Rumpelstiltskin. He provides what you need to get your work done and demands a steep payment in return: the output of your lifeforce. But he hasn’t really thought through what he’s going to do with that payment once he collects it. Can you picture Rumpelstiltskin changing diapers? Do donors actually read these long, mind-numbingly boring documents? But, as usual, I digress.

The catch: there’s some important critical info in those reports. It’s good to know what you’ve achieved. Documenting your accomplishments and failures matters. Your organization’s stories matter. Knowing where you’ve been and where you’re going and all that. Trick is to make sure you’re gathering and sharing the info that will work for you.

But there is a way. Call it out. Admit that annual reports are boring. Have some fun. That’s what the brilliant folks at the Amazon Conservation Association did. Enrique Ortiz, co-founder of the ACA, awesome Peruvian biologist, and one of my mostfavorite people ever, shared with me their masterpiece: The Los Amigos Moore Project Final Report, NON-BORING VERSION (download PDF, 5.5MB).

I read it. Twice. And so did the people at the Moore Foundation (yes, that Moore — a huge donor to things Amazon, as well as to Conservation International). Rumor has it one of the first reports read widely cover to cover. Ever ever.

The comic was produced with an application that turns photos into illustrations. Will ask Enrique and post name of it in the comments. Yes, I’m sure it took a lot of time to produce. But I bet you the team felt energized after creating it. It’s a wonderful example for the rest of us. Thanks ACA!