Building Knowledge4Policy

We’re building Knowledge4Policy (K4P), the EU Commission’s platform for evidence-based policymaking. All contributions welcome.

K4P platform aims to support evidence-based policymaking: bridging the gap between policymakers — who (in theory) develop public policy based on sound scientific evidence — and the scientists who develop that evidence in the first place.

“organise scientific knowledge from across Europe, for policymakers across Europe”

Our societies are poorer when these worlds do not work together effectively. But while both science and politics have become increasingly international, they also seem to be drifting further away from each other.

The international nature of both science and politics, moreover, also means we cannot limit K4P to just the Commission’s scientists and policymakers — we need to organise scientific knowledge from across Europe, for policymakers across Europe.

Minimum Viable Platform

That’s a vast scope. So we’re getting started in classic start-up fashion, with a Minimum Viable Product-style platform going live next month.

At launch, K4P will be not much more than a search engine sitting atop a database of knowledge, migrated into the platform from a few pilot ‘knowledge services’ managed by the Joint Research Centre, the EC’s in-house science service.

That’s a bigger knowledge management challenge than it sounds:

• Each knowledge service has spent years developing and curating a wide variety of knowledge: publications, datasets, news, studies, data visualisations and more.
• All of this content, of course, has been classified using each team’s own taxonomy. But we need to bring them together in a single interconnected database, with a unified taxonomy (we’ll in fact be the first users of the Commission’s new global ‘EUROPA Thesaurus’).
• Nevertheless, we still need to allow each knowledge service to have its own ‘space’ within its platform, with its own local taxonomy, subject-specific features and even specialised communities of interest or practice.
• And all this has to be built using a back-end architecture which is scalable, so we can add many, many more knowledge sources from across the European Commission post-Launch.

From Knowledge to Policy

Unfortunately, bringing databases of scientific knowledge together will not alone be nearly enough. We need to find an architecture, content strategy and feature set to build scientific knowledge into something policymakers can use, and which can bring these two worlds closer together.

an architecture, content strategy and feature set to build scientific knowledge into something policymakers can use

So, in parallel to the MVP build, we’re doing some in-depth audience research to discover what our audiences actually want and need, including ethnographic interviews, a targeted online survey and focus groups. The results should be ready by the time we go live, allowing us to define our workprogramme for the rest of the year.

Join in

We are not the only team out there grappling with these problems — the JRC’s EU4Facts conference last year, for example, brought to Brussels some fascinating insights from around the world.

We’ve therefore launched this Publication to share our experiences as we build Knowledge4Policy as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world.

So don’t just Follow us to stay informed - we welcome your ideas, knowledge and opinions. Please Respond to one of our posts, and/or submit your own.