Knowledge4Policy: what do policymakers want?
Our day in Strasbourg buttonholing passing MEPs could not have been more different than the two hour focus group we held with scientists a couple of weeks earlier. Which is entirely appropriate.
(Update: the entire audience research process was summarised in Evidence-based policymaking: a story emerges from audience research, 2/10/2018)
Instead of sitting in a quiet circle for a couple of hours, discussing what researchers need from the Knowledge4Policy (K4P) web platform, we had staked out a corner of an exhibition inside the EU Parliament in Strasbourg. It was plenary week, so MEPs, their assistants, policy advisors and lobbyists passed constantly by on their way to meetings, the plenary room or — most importantly — the canteen.
The exhibition was built by the Commission’s science and knowledge service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC), to celebrate their 60th birthday last year, and came to Strasbourg as a backdrop to the launch of the latest Knowledge Service (Knowledge Centre on Food Fraud and Quality). It is visually quite arresting, which helped us grab some MEPs and their orbiting staff and ask them a few questions.
So while we had plenty of people to talk to, we didn’t have much time with each, resulting in over a dozen diverse “vignettes” of audience needs and user stories. Together, they helped answer a lot of our questions: what do policymakers need from science? In what format? When? How and where do they get information today? What’s missing?
what do policymakers need from science? In what format? When? How? … What’s missing?
But they also identified further questions needing a more in-depth approach to answer. I was accompanied by an ethnographer, so I was lucky enough to spend most of the time listening and catching ideas, which we then reflected into the next interview.
The rest of this post sets out those ideas, and some early observations about what they could mean for the K4P Platform, along four main lines:
We’ll finalise our audience research in the coming weeks, so please Join In. And if you’re in Paris from April 9–10, the JRC’s Skills for evidence-informed policy making workshop may be of interest.
Content Strategy: what content, in what format?
Keep it Brief
We didn’t, of course, need to go to Strasbourg to discover that policymakers value brevity.
Nevertheless, the trip did show just how much work is required: the exhibition, built to make the JRC’s scientific work more accessible to policymakers, highlighted tomes of scientific work hundreds of pages long.
One of the Knowledge Services had an executive summary of a report which was itself 40-odd pages long — or around 20 times longer than what most policymakers will read. The actual report, if dropped onto its head from the 3rd floor, would probably kill a T-Rex.
While a lot of scientific research comes accompanied by 1–2 page executive summaries, however, we wanted to know what the policymakers still missed.
A face to a name
One answer surprised us: scientists’ names.
One interviewee told us that whenever he was given a scientific paper, one thing he always looked up was the names of the authors, while another mentioned they often have difficulty identifying experts to invite to events.
To seek the Scientist… rather than the Science
This chimes with something researchers said at their focus group last month — because policymakers are aware of the Timing problem (below), a common first reaction is not to ask What is known about a pressing issue, but Who knows about it. To seek the Scientist, in other words, rather than the Science.
Capacity Building
Many liked the idea of a Platform which explicitly sets out to train scientists to communicate with policymakers, and policymakers to communicate with scientists. Content ranging from animations to MOOCs could fall under this heading, along with an actual training programme.
On a related note, glossaries dedicating to ‘bridging the gap’ between science and policy would also be highly valuable to some, as one word can mean different things when used by scientists and politicians.
Data visualisations were not as popular as “data explained in a way I can understand”, and the most common request was “five bullet points”
First thoughts from Strasbourg
- The Platform will need one or more dedicated content types summarising key research results for policymakers. Data visualisations were not as popular as “data explained in a way I can understand”, and the most common request was “five bullet points”
- This content should link to profiles of the scientists who did the original work — useful to policymakers, and (presumably) to the scientists. See also: Online Community Management, below
- The Platform’s architecture must highlight this content to policymakers, so they don’t need to search through the thousands of datasets, scientific papers, studies and more in the Platform’s Resource Centre. See also: Thematic Interfaces, below
- Creating this content is a skill, so the Platform will need to offer scientists a Content Partnership: they contribute Subject Matter Expertise, and the Platform contributes specialised editorial (and possibly graphic) skills to process research into policymaker-friendly form
- That Content Partnership could also involve training scientists in creating this content — and could even train policymakers in interpreting research.
A Question of Timing
One issue brought up by the scientists last month was confirmed multiple times in Strasbourg: science and policymaking march to different beats, a problem the EU4Facts conference last year also highlighted.
“Policymakers are firefighters, not long-term planners… They need simple answers, right now”
— “Is anyone reading our work?”: what researchers want from policymakers
Unsurprisingly, as a result:
- Policymakers are frustrated when scientists don’t have answers when they need them, generally yesterday, or matching a legislative timetable
- Scientists are frustrated when policymakers don’t show an interest when the scientist has results, after spending years developing it.
It is clearly insufficient to simply hope that the world of Research will publish exactly what Policy needs, just as they need it. We need to design synchronicity into the Platform.
We need to design synchronicity into the Platform
First thoughts from Strasbourg
The ‘4’ in “Knowledge4Policy” stands for “for”: the Platform manages and processes scientific knowledge for policymakers. So could K4P interface these two worlds by using the legislative timetable to drive its editorial calendar (see Content Strategy, above)?
Thematic Interfaces
The policymakers’ focus on the legislative timetable could also inform site architecture.
Right now, as set out earlier, we’re building a “Minimum Viable Platform”(MVP), where we explore solutions to the issues we’re discovering as we migrate a few Knowledge Services into a single environment.
One of the bigger challenges we’re facing is in importing diverse databases of knowledge, classified using different taxonomies developed by a variety of Knowledge Services. We’ve decided to adopt a Thesaurus, currently being developed to manage content across the Commission’s web presence, as a single, global taxonomy to classify knowledge.
while scientists might find this highly granular Thesaurus useful… it’s not nearly enough for less specialised users
But while scientists may find this highly granular Thesaurus useful (and it will help all users search the platform), this is not enough for less specialised users like policymakers and advisers. For this we foresaw Platform-level Themes, assembling knowledge from multiple Knowledge Services, and highlighting editorial products for policymakers (see Content Strategy, above).
With only a handful of Knowledge Services going live next month, however, our MVP won’t feature Themes — they’ll come later, when we have more content and a better grasp of the Platform’s long-term content strategy.
First thoughts from Strasbourg
Could these Platform Themes directly reflect the legislative environment — for example, one Theme for each EU Parliament Committee? This would provide a knowledge interface clearly dedicated to policymakers, and reinforce to scientists on the Platform how their content is relevant to policymaking.
But how would other policymakers outside the European Parliament feel about such an interface?
Online Community Management
One of the initial assumptions underlying the Platform back in 2016 was that the Platform would support online communities.
But what sort of communities? Why would people join? What would they get from it? Online communities are often seen as a cure-all, but usually fail unless carefully calibrated to their audiences’ needs and preferences.
Online communities are often seen as a cure-all, but usually fail
In 2017, for example, initial consultations showed many Knowledge Services wanting communities of practice, composed of researchers, to help curate and transfer useful knowledge from across Europe.
But what of wider communities of interest, bringing together researchers and policymakers to improve knowledge transfer and policymaking?
Our audience research has so far indicated policymakers would take part in such online spaces only under certain, limited circumstances.
Conversations in Strasbourg, on the other hand, showed us a strong potential role for Online Community Management: to actively mediate between the legislative-driven needs of policymakers and the scientific knowledge (and scientists) on the Platform.
First thoughts from Strasbourg
Could there be an Online Community Manager (OCM) for each Platform Theme? Such an OCM could be responsible for:
- convening a community of scientists relevant to that Theme, and hence one legislative area
- working with them to create content for policymakers, when they know the policymakers will need it — i.e., the Theme’s editorial calendar would reflect the Theme’s legislative agenda (see ‘Content Strategy’ and ‘Timing’)
- fielding questions from policymakers: where possible answering them, and where necessary bringing together the right scientists to answer it
- closing the feedback loop: providing feedback to scientists about the policy uptake of their work, which our first focus group showed scientists want.
With both policymakers and researchers valuing highly their offline communities and face-to-face interactions, the Platform should probably not provide an alternative to face-to-face conversations, but could complement and extend them.
Final thoughts, next steps
Miscellaneous observations
More than a couple of the people we spoke to said that lobbyists did a better job of communicating science to them than scientists themselves, leading us to wonder whether the K4P Web Platform should take up a ‘Lobbying for Science’ role.
lobbyists do a better job of communicating science to policymakers than scientists … [should] the Platform take up a ‘Lobbying for Science’ role?
Many MEPs advised reaching out to the people supporting them — research assistants, policy advisers, civil servants and even lobbyists. This contrasts with what many scientists told us: that the only way to get research into policy was to talk directly with the policymakers themselves, ideally on actual legislative wording.
Policymakers also stressed their desire to listen to a range of views — and to be seen to do so — before coming to policy conclusions. Content which helps identify a scientific consensus on a topic — without hiding areas of contention — would be of great value. On a similar note, content which helps policymakers communicate science to their constituents would be popular with many of the MEPs we spoke to, opening up the intriguing idea of recruiting politicians as a science communication channel.
The value some saw in curating news, finally, surprised me, until someone explained that, after spending weeks or more developing a policy position and days more crafting a speech to launch it, the last thing they needed was to discover they’d missed an important development a couple of days before their speech. So we’ll need enewsletters and ‘follow the tag’ systems.
Join in
Strasbourg gave us the other side of the science/policy coin, so we now have some working hypotheses. However, there are still gaps, so I hope our final audience research — either face-to-face in Brussels or via webinar — will include a mix of policymakers and the people surrounding them.
Transparency is one of our bywords, so we’ll continue publishing as much as possible here. Follow us to stay informed. To contribute:
- to the focus group: please use this form,
- take our audience research survey
- respond to this post, or submit your own
- policymakers and experts working at the science/policy interface: check out the Skills for evidence-informed policy making workshop next month (April 9–10, Paris).
