R4D dashboard: Visualize web access to DFID funded research

Collecting traffic and usage statistics for a website or portal can be a very time consuming and tedious task. And in most cases you end up compiling monthly or quarterly report for managers and donors that will be shared as email attachments - and at best skimmed, since there is so much information. But there are smarter ways you can do this process and bring life into your data, as as I explained in my previous blog.

Our case study is the R4D portal, a free access on-line portal containing the latest information about research funded by DFID, including details of current and past research in over 40,000 project and document records. Until 2013 we were part of the team supporting and managing the site.

As part of our work packages, we developed an online, interactive visualization of web traffic and usage of the R4D portal and its social media channels. The R4D dashboard, built using Tableau Public, is still updated and in use. However, since the termination of our support contract, it hasn't been iterated and improved since 2014.

This posts presents the process we followed to develop the dashboard, the tools used and the lessons learned in what was very much a learning by doing journey.

R4D Usage Dashboard 

 Why develop the R4D dashboard? 

The collection of usage and traffic data for R4D used to be pretty much standard: a series of excel files updated monthly to generate charts and graphs. They were then put together in a PDF report and shared with project leads at DFID. The idea to develop instead an online, public dashboard of R4D web traffic and usage was inspired by the excellent work from Nick Scott and ODI, which he shared with us during a Peer Exchange session we organized back in 2012.

Donor organisations such as DFID collect a lot of statistics and indicators but these are often kept within projects and programmes and not made available for all staff, as was the case for R4D. So the reason behind the R4D dashboard was primarily to open up our stats and make them more accessible to anybody interested in it, not just the people that had sign off on the project.

Also, by encouraging a more open approach to web stats, the idea was also to have more terms of comparison: it is difficult to evaluate how well your website is doing if you can only compare against yourself. So being able to see how much traffic similar websites are generating will help you assess your own effort and performance.

So what did we do?

Process wise, we pretty much followed the steps indicated in my previous blog posts. With the primary audience well in mind, we started to select the metrics to include in the dashboard:

• Website stats: Visits and visitors; referring sites; visitors by country; PDF downloads and top pages. 
• RSS feeds subscribers Twitter clickthroughs and Facebook Insights data (later removed)
• Number of outputs added to the R4D database (by type, for example open access articles, peer review articles, etc…) 

We decided that it was feasible to collect this data monthly as xls or cvs files exported to from the site(s) and save them into a shared Dropbox folder. This was the most effective way as data collection was decentralized with different people working on different platforms. With our limited budget, it was not possible to automate the data collection process, so this was entirely manual.

Software platform selection took quite some time in the initial phase of the process. We selected Tableau Public as our dashboard platform, and then had to invest more time in learning its features and functionality. But it was totally worth it!

Why Tableau? 

Tableau Public is free software that can allow anyone to connect to a spreadsheet or file and create interactive data visualizations for the web. There are many tutorials out there if you just Google for it, so I’m not going to tell you here how it works in details. But here are my top reason for using Tableau Public:

• It's free! Well, that's a good reason already if you don't have resources to invest in business intelligence or visualization software - and normally the cost for these are steep and way outside the budget of the organizations we work with; 
• It's intuitive. You don't need to be an expert to use the tool. The interface is very simple (drag and drop) and you can easily find your way around. 
• It's rich and deep. There are so many charts you can choose from and you can play around with different visualization until you are happy with the result. It also goes much deeper than Excel with analysis and interactions.

What did we learn? 

Besides learning how to use Tableau Public itself, here are the main things I learned along and around the process of developing the R4D dashboard:

• Google Analytics is the industry market standard - but it tends to under-count your traffic.
  We ran two different website analytics packages on the main R4D portal - Google Analytics (GA) and SmarterStats - and noticed a huge difference in the results, with GA massively under-counting visits and visitors. So it's always worth installing another tracker to be on the safe side. 
• Updating Tableau is quick - but getting the data manually isn't
  Once your dashboard is set up, the process of updating it with new data is rather quick, just a few clicks and you are done. However data collection from the various sources in our case was mostly manual and it can be time consuming (and not much fun either!). If I were still working on the project, I’d look into ways to automate as much as possible data collection - while also looking at what additional (useful) data I could collect in an automated way. 
• Build it once - and then you *must* iterate
  When you're done building your dashboard, you're actually not done. We had a couple of iterations before arriving at the product that is now online. And I'm sure this would be different now had the project continued. This is because you have to evaluate whether the visualizations in the dashboard are actually useful and provide you actionable insights that can inform your strategy. Or simply because the software keeps evolving and can give you new possibilities that were not there before.

In the next post on this series I'll present a different approach to develop an M&E dashboard, this time using a combination of Google Forms, Sheets and Charts, together with Google Apps Scripts and Google Docs Add Ons.

In the meantime, if you have experience with Tableau or use other tools to create interactive dashboards, why not share it in the comments here?

Research to Impact Hackathon ....and the winner was...

Well, we were all winners, if truth be told, in the sense that we all learned a lot from the experience of the Hackathon at iHub Research in Nairobi last week. To begin with, the iHub itself is still under three years old yet has blossomed into an extraordinary innovation centre at the centre of a buzzing ecosystem of developers, projects, events, people, good coffee and, well, more people. There are over 10,000 registered members of the iHub community and it was through those networks that we were able to attract so many creative and plugged-in developers.

One of the newer projects is iHub Research, one of the co-organisers of the event. Leo Mukutu is Research Manager there and she was one of the judges of the competition. In this clip Leo describes the role of iHub Research and the criteria she used to judge the entries.



There were six entries in all, and in this video clip people from each team describe their proposals - and you can see who won!

(Update: a summary blog from iHub research) 

'Let me Hackathon that thing'

'Every good piece of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch', says Eric Raymond, author of the fabulous book on Open Source software, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Hackathons evolved to harness that personal passion of software developers to create interesting code that solves problems - or sometimes, just create elegant, interesting code simply to see what happens. Organisers provide a context - for example software platforms such as Ushahidi that constantly need to to be improved or movements and campaigns such as development data or aid transparency which need lots of programmes to import and aggregate data or present the data in a form usable by others and the public - and a space, with coffee, cakes and chocolate. Developers who enjoy working individually or in teams and are moved by the spirit of the organisers come together and have fun.

The Research to Impact Hackathon is different in significant ways to a standard hackathon. Firstly, there is often criticism that these events produce a lot of interesting but unfinished code, which is either taken over by the sponsor and developed internally or simply abandoned, with the developers un-engaged in the follow up. The sponsors of this event, IDS/ELDIS and CABI/R4D see this event as Phase One in a longer term process. They are providing small prizes for the best products but committing larger sums to supporting the development of particularly promising ideas and prototypes that have the potential to increase the use of research data.

Secondly, we wanted to provide focus to the developers based on an informed understanding of specific challenges faced on the ground, in East Africa, by those working in agriculture and nutrition, challenges which constrain the use of development data and opportunities it offers to enrich the development process. However, we had to steer carefully between being too directive of the developers - which could reduce creative and risk appearing to be asking for some free labour to help large organisations solve their problems - and not providing a clear enough set of scenarios.

So we were a bit anxious about how Day Two of the Hackathon would develop, especially since we were joined by some new developers who hadn't had the introduction to the personas, challenges and triggers which emerged from Day One of the Hackathon nor been part of the Ideation session. We should have known better: we are in the iHub, in Nairobi, Kenya, at the centre of a vibrant developer community, supported by the ideas and contacts of iHub Research. Many of the participants had been trained in mobile application development at the mLab - yet another source of energy within the iHub ecosystem (and the iHub is not even three years old!). And all the developers were in some way or another connected or developing software solutions to the needs of those in the agriculture value chain.

We introduced the data available from ELDIS, R4D and other relevant open data sources, including the World Bank's data site and the rapidly growing Kenyan Government OpenData portal; the ways to access the data through the ELDIS open API and the tools which Tim Davies is developing to access the data, including in Linked Data formats. Finally we introduced the personas from Day One, together with the ideas which had been rated as having the highest potential impact and most viable as the basis for developing a Proof of Concept in only two days (and nights!).

Chaos of the most productive kind ensued. People discussed ideas; formed, and reformed, teams; ate sausages; asked for more information about the personas; drank coffee; got support in exploring the data and learning to use the access tools available; fed-back ideas for discussion; storyboarded and planned; ate cake; began to hack. By the end of the day four groupings of ideas and people had emerged, all interesting and within the frameworks we had established, and some with the beginnings of demonstration code - either created or imported. Then we went for beer.

Day Three is a hack-day: teams will continue working on their ideas, preparing for a presentation on the morning of the fourth day, in some kind of Dragon's Den format. While the progress has been remarkable for two days, the acid test is, of course, what the teams can present on Day Four. Given their commitment to the longer term, the organisers are looking as much for coherent plans and realistic assumptions as finished code - but watch this space.

Research to Impact Hackathon with iHub Research, Nairobi

Open data on the web makes it possible to take information on research from many sources, and to generate ‘mash-ups’ that make it available in different places, on different platforms, and in ways that support action and impact. Open data can be remixed to answer key questions in ways that were not possible before.

One of the most interesting developments in the R4D project, which we have been supporting with CommsConsult and CABI, has been converting the metadata in the R4D database of DfID funded research to Open and Linked Data formats. The Institute for Development Studies (IDS) ELDIS team have been travelling in the same direction - working to open up access to their research information including by creating open APIs allowing anyone to tap into their 15+ years of curated development research. The rationale for this is that every year institutions, researchers and practitioners generate thousands of datasets, reports and articles about development issues. To give some idea of scale, DfID funds £200 million worth of research every year. Yet, much of this knowledge remains underused, locked away in online repositories such as R4D and ELDIS.

Presenting personas at the Research to Impact Hackathon

We tested this, perhaps a little unfairly, by asking the participants during the first day of the Hackathon we're working on this week in Nairobi, most of whom were subject experts we'd invited to provide context and scenarios for the developers to get their teeth into, how much they used either R4D or ELDIS data. About half had accessed the sites, very few accessed them more than once or twice a year. Yet these were researchers, information scientists and knowledge workers with intermediary NGOs like ALIN, all prime targets from the materials.

"Hackathons" (also known as a hackfest or hack day) are events in which computer programmers join forces with a number of other experts, such as designers, investors, project managers, and spend a short intense period together to develop technical ideas and solutions. The Research to Impact hackathon is focusing on the research data from R4D, ELDIS and other relevant sources - including those from Kenya such as KAINET - relating to agriculture and nutrition. We brought together subject matter experts with technical developers to explore and create innovative prototypes to increase the use and impact of research in development. The hackathon is being at the Nairobi iHub by iHub Research, a new programme within this open innovation space.

The first day focused on generating scenarios - use cases - for the developers to work on. We started by asking participants to identify some of the reasons that research data isn't accessed or used. The group then selected seven typical 'user types' who represent key potential audiences for the data. These personas included extension workers, researchers and knowledge workers - key intermediary roles for re-purposing data and linking with primary players in the agricultural value chain such as farmers, input suppliers and market intermediaries. The group also prioritised fleshing out the role of policy actors, key to addressing the whole range of issues which impact those working directly in agriculture. Working in groups these types were profiled and linked to the challenges previously identified. After rapid peer review specific 'triggers' were identified for each of the personas, things which might motivate them to change their behaviour in relation to the data. The personas will be shared in the EuforicWeb wiki as the Hackathon develops.

Evaluating ideas at the Research to Impact Hackathon

A group of developers joined in the afternoon. They were presented with the personas and had time to interrogate the subject specialists. We finished with an ideation session, when all participants were given 10 minutes to come up with at least 10 suggestions for technical developments - mobile or pad apps, web widgets or small pieces of linking or bridging code. Those ideas were located on a matrix representing high/low impact, high/low viability - in terms of being able to develop a proof of concept in the succeeding two days. There were an extraordinary number and range of ideas, both creative and very applied. The ideas which were voted as high/high will be taken into the hackdays to help kick-start the process.

Data cake

As part of our R4D work we're thinking about the next stage in its open data strategy, building on the work done by Tim Davies with CABI on publishing the R4D data in linked-data formats. So this just feels right:



Image by EpicGraphic

Thanks to @Duncan_IDS for the link

R4D Peer Exchange on Theories of Change - Videos and resources

On July 31 2012 we organised a Peer Exchange session on Theories of Change (ToC). The event took place at DFID in London, was organised in the context of the R4D project with our colleagues from CABI and CommsConsult. The aim was to better understand how ToC can be used in research uptake and communication programmes.

Around 15 people took part in this two-hour session. For the occasion, as well as DFID staff, we were joined by Duncan Green from Oxfam GB and Simon Batchelor from IDS, who have both done a lot of thinking and and writing on the subject of ToC and research.

Two excellent summaries and reflections on the meeting can be found on Duncan Green's blog and on Research to Action website:

• Can theories of change help researchers (or their funders) have more impact?
• 10 ways DFID can improve Theories of Change for Research Uptake

After the session, we recorded a short conversation with Simon Batchelor and Duncan Green. In the video below, Simon and Duncan explain how they got interested in Theories of Change. They discuss how ToC can be used in research programmes and how DFID and other donors could created incentives for researchers to use ToC in their work. 

The video is about 12 minutes long but worth watching there is rich content and insights that reflect the discussion and debate of the day.

In case you don't have time to watch the full recording, we have also produced these five short clips:

• Using Theories of Change in development programmes
• How to create incentives for researchers wanting to do Theories of Change?
• Theories of Change in research uptake
• Theories of Change and communications in research projects

More resources and discussions on Theories of Change in research can be found on the Research to Action website.

Blog posts from previous R4D Peer Exchange sessions are available at this link.

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Connecting and engaging with research audiences: Oxfam social media mix and strategy

Earlier in April 2012 the third and last R4D peer exchange meeting took place in DFID. After having discussed issues related to measuring the success in research uptake and understanding audiences behaviours in accessing digital content, this third session looked into how to connect and engage with research audiences. Joel Bassouk, Digital Communications Manager at Oxfam International, presented the great work that his organisation is doing, how they are using social media and the results they are achieving.

Connecting with audiences with social media

View more PowerPoint from Euforic Services

Oxfam social media mix and strategy may be fairly similar to what others are doing but clearly the scale of the results achieved by the organisation is impressive. Some key points and practises are definitely worth mentioning and highlighting.

According to Joel, connecting and engaging with users online means first and foremost to know the audiences you are targeting your communication to. Google Analytics, user surveys and regular content audits are key elements of this process.

Once you have clear who you want to reach, the next step is to create good and engaging content: research reports, articles, policy papers, blogs, press releases, photos, videos, infographics, presentations, case studies, op-eds, interviews - these are all content items that need to be taken in consideration. But equally important, it's to define clear guidelines, workflows and sign-off process that each staff member can easily access through the corporate intranet.

However, it is not enough to have great content if this just sits on a website. Therefore, Joel reminded us how important it is for this content to be findable, searchable and shareable. In Oxfam's experience, as for may other organisation, visits from search engines represent the first source of inbound traffic. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and writing for the web need to be taken seriously if you want make sure Google search works in your favour and not against you. 

Additionally, one key element that emerged from Oxfam experience is the need to repackage and cross post content on the different social media channels in use. Oxfam produces a lot of research reports and the digital communication team accompanies these with additional outputs such as infographics and images but also sound bites and 'three things about the report'. These additional outputs are tweeted and posted on the appropriate channels.

But with all the social and digital media available, how do you choose the right mix? According to Joel, there's a clear A-list that forms Oxfam social media portfolio: Facebook, Twitter YouTube and Flickr are clearly the must-have channels. Additionally, Oxfam makes also use of Google+, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Scribd.

Last but not least, RSS feed should not be forgotten - and I cannot agree more with this: as an old colleague of ours used to say, "RSS are really the blood of the social web."

How ODI uses digital tools for measuring success in research uptake

A fascinating peer exchange last week in DFID discussed issues (and possible solutions) to the challenges related to monitoring and evaluating research uptake and communication efforts. The session, facilitated by my colleague Pete Cranston, was the first in a series of 3 meetings organised as part of the R4D project, to address different aspects of social media and engagement in and around development research.

The conversation was started by an excellent presentation from ODI’s Nick Scott. Over the past months, Nick has put a lot of effort into looking at how ODI was doing its own M&E of research uptake. As a result, the organisation has adopted a new analytical framework - and a new set of tools to track usage and uptake of their research outputs. The ODI approach and dashboard is well described by Nick in a recent post and presented in the slides below - if you have missed them and are interested in the subject, make sure you have a read both of them.

ODI's M&E approach and dashboard on Prezi

What the ODI’s experience shows is why and how research organisations should escape the “tyranny of downloads”. Downloads and pageviews alone are simply not enough to capture the different ways in which users interacts with the digital content in today’s social web. For example, for ODI a good 10% of their traffic is generated by social media. Tweets, shares, Facebook likes they all add a new layer of information that needs to be taken into account. An efficient use of digital tools can help in capturing much more of this information and do a better job in assessing the uptake and impact of research outputs.

Additionally, even when you are able to track all these elements, you need to make up your mind and decide on which metrics you are actually going to focus. When it comes to Google Analytics for example, ODI focuses on just a couple of the many different things you can track - unique visitors, entry pages, country of origin and a few others. But the choice of metrics and indicators is very much related to the goals you want to achieve, and how the information gathered can be put to use.

But why track stats and pile up information if you can’t make use of it? ODI M&E reports are now more intuitive to read, more colorful and graphic and able to present insights in easy formats. They are shared throughout the organisations in a much more open way. Further, because the different statistics are tracked at the level of the single outputs produced, they provide ODI’s communications team with the evidence to back up what its already known, but not always proved: using a balanced mix of channels and a more comprehensive communication approach creates a positive circle that gives more mileage to the research outputs. ODI researchers are now more inclined to write opinion pieces and blog posts that complement research reports, or to tweet about their new publications.

Finally, looking at the specific technical implementation that ODI has put in place, this seems to be rather advanced and complex. It uses APIs, servers logs and business intelligent applications to combine a set of different statistics into a structured dataset that can be enquired at any given moment though a dashboard interface. This is the result of 6 months of work and quite some investment in time and technology, so it wouldn’t probably be a viable solution smaller organisations. However, as Nick suggests in the video below, there is a huge need of a ‘think tank M&E’ tool that is affordable and allows to track the footprint of research outputs across the social web. Hopefully we won’t have to wait long before such an application is available.

User personas and users journeys for website review and design

In January I had the opportunity to spend three days in the office of our friends and colleagues at CommsConsult to plan the future development of the Research to Action website.

Research to Action was set up in the context of the DFID funded R4D project, managed by CABI with CommsConsult and Euforic Services. It continues what we had started in 2009 with the CommsCorner blog, a simple website to provide examples of good communications practice to support research uptake.

The site has seen its audience steadily increasing over the past months. Some specific contents have proved to be rather engaging for the site readers, being read, shared and commented on several times. The growing number of Twitter followers are helping to establish the site niche, and give the contents produced more mileage through different communities. More important, several guest bloggers have contributed their experiences and cases through the site.

The way the site has developed over the past year, required us to re-look at it, its value proposition, the audiences it intends to speak to and, equally important, the ‘online neighbourhood’ in which it coexist with many other initiatives. Ultimately, we want to redesign the functionality and usability of  Research to Action to ensure it provides a useful online space to access resources and commentaries on maximising research uptake and impact.

As Betty Allen explains in her blog post on Research to Action:

We underwent a process of user experience modelling by creating fictional profiles of a group of R2A users. These so-called ‘user personas’ are a well-known method for ensuring that the content of a website meets the needs of those that will be using it. [...]With the user personas we were able to create five different typical user journeys to the R2A site, while taking a step back and approaching the content from different perspectives. This enabled us to truthfully asses whether the content is structured in a clear and beneficial way for our users.”[read on...]

While I enjoyed very much this process and the results it brought in terms of reviewing the site plan and developing update wire frames, I also found it challenging at times. Especially because we were reviewing an existing site. we always had to remind ourselves not too look to much at what we had, but at what we aimed to have. The possibility to look at the uses cases and journey as we progressed in the review helped us to keep the focus on the different audiences the site intends to speak to.

European Development Days 2009: the power of networking

Last week Stockholm hosted the European Development Days, a three day event involving a number of heads of State and thousands of development professionals and students from all over Europe, indeed the world. You can read it all on the official EDD-website.

Even though Euforic – as readers of this blog will know – is scaling down its operations, we were present in Stockholm to promote one of the many exciting projects Euforic has been involved in over the last few years: R4D, an information service providing free access to information on DFID (co)financed research for development programs and over 20,000 outputs of these research efforts.

Several Euforic members presented panel discussions at the European Development Days, or the Development D-days as Rajendra Pachauri, Director General of the Energy Resources Insitute in New Delhi and one of the keynote speakers, called them. CTA invited twelve partners from the South to have stands at the Development Village and organized an important event about land acquisition (also known as “land grabbing”). At an event co-organized by AFD, Koos Richelle, head of AIDCO and others examined aid practices. AFD also organized with DFID and DIE a debate about the evolving aid architecture. Concord co-organized an event about development education, sharing ideas and experiences around involving and mobilizing citizens for development. Citizens were also central to the ECDPM-organized event about the EU-Africa Partnership. EADI together with the Development Gateway Foundation looked at the future of European Development Cooperation: Development Beyond 2015 and APRODEV, CIDSE and Concord staged an event on Copenhagen, Climate Justice and the Right to Development. SNV had a session on Accountability and Transparency and cheered us all up with a musical spectacle at the end of the second day.

Most events attracted quite some interest. A crowd of EDD-visitors lined-up outside the forum on Media and Development. In the panel, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, President of Liberia, Raile Odinga, Prime Minister of Kenya, blogger and digital activist Ndesanjo Macha and others discussed the role of media in development. Dominique Darmon of SNV was lucky to get in and reported that there was an extensive discussion around the role of new media. Nowadays in Africa over 17 million phones are in use ... or at least, in use when there is electricity, as Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf noted, underlining that energy and infrastructure are critical priorities for investment in this continent. Odinga explained how he used a blog to communicate with the electorate during the recent presidential election campaign in Kenya, but someone in the audience noted that comments from readers of the blog were screened and the comments criticizing Odinga actually never made it to his blog. So new media can promote interaction and participation but they do not eliminate exclusion, whether because of lack of electricity or because of censorship.

Written communication does not reach too many Africans because of the high illiteracy rates, television is important but technically much more demanding than radio which is the number one “old” means of communication in the continent. At the same time, mobile devices are changing the way the good old radio is operating, boosting its use through for example podcast. During the session several other examples of mobile phone use were highlighted for example how they were used to warn people during recent floodings in Burkina Faso. Phones can also be used to hold the government accountable as the HIVOS/SNV project Twaweza demonstrates.

Some participants in the audience felt that new media pose a greater risk of misinformation while others laud their potential to promote democracy. A BBC reporter asked the politicians in the panel what at the end of the day would make them more uncomfortable: a bad news paper story, or a critical blog ... thus showing that the good old newspaper remains critically important.

Having to attend my R4D stand in the Development Village I saw few live presentations. But I made an exception for the “testimonies” on climate change that were given in the morning of the last day, 25 October. Michelle Duvivier Pierre-Louis, Prime Minister of Haiti and former executive of the Soros-sponsored Knowledge and Freedom Foundation told about the seven (7) hurricanes that hit her country over the last few years and asked for fairness and just reparations as part of the strategy to confront the climate change crisis, “The market mechanism is not going to save the planet”, she insisted. Moderator Sackur, known from BBC’s “Hard Talk” highlighted her systematic emphasis on fairness and justice and he asked her whether – when talking with European leaders, she felt they actually “got it”. Very honestly she replied that her gut feeling was not very good, but she also made it clear she will not give up fighting for climate justice.

President Emanual Manny Mori of the Federated States of Micronesia explained how his country has been fighting for climate justice for quite some time already. The small islands state is very much exposed to the potentially disastrous effects of the sea level increase. To anyone who doubts whether this is a serious crisis he urged to reflect “Who are you fooling? Not the oceans and disappearing species”. Mori insisted that all nations will have to bite the bullet: “We will face a different world in our lifetime”

Mary Simon has been an activist for Inuit interests for decades. “My homeland is melting” she stated, “the situation is terrifying, villages just sink in the ground because of melting permafrost”. The changes may very well exceed the traditional capacities op her people to adapt. Simon concludes that previous efforts to reduce carbon emissions have not done the job, public policies have fallen short and emissions have continued to grow. Simon stressed the interrelation between economic and environmental security and calls for massive investments in clean technology. A Climate Change Adaptation Fund of 20 billion euro needs to become operational now, not by 2022 as current proposals suggest. Besides climate change, Simon also warned for what she labeled to be misguided policies that affect the Inuit people like the upgrade in CITES of the polar bear which makes them an endangered species, and the EU ban on seal products. It is climate change that endangers the polar bear, she said, Inuit hunting practices are sustainable. She felt that such policies negatively affect the Inuits capacity to adapt and preserve their livelihoods.

Back at my R4D stand, I listened to Margot Wallström, Vice-President of the European Commission, through a video live-stream. She said that the political realities will force the EU to be more ambitious about reduction of CO2 emission and deliver climate justice. With Michelle Duvivier and the others we continue to hope (but fear her gut feeling).

For more stories on the European Development Days, check the official EDD-site and sites of Euforic member organizations.

by Rosien Herweijer

See also Euforic's newsfeeds on Euforic cooperative life on European Development Days and on Information, knowledge, and communication

R4D at the European Development Days

During the 4th edition of the European Development Days - held from 22 to 24 October in Stockholm - Euforic actively promotes the Research for Development (R4D) project.

R4D is a free access portal containing information about research programmes supported by DFID. It provides you with the latest information about research funded by DFID in the framework of its 2008 Research Strategy, including news, case studies and details of current and past research in over 20,000 project and document records. Information is available on a broad range of topics, such as sustainable agriculture, climate change, economic development, health and capacity building.

R4D is unique in the sense that it makes information available to researchers, students and policy makers that hitherto was circulated at a limited scale. Documents and reports are presented in full text, there are various search options for different types of information, plus the Research Dialogue and Communications Corner blogs allow for reflection and debate.

Please feel free to meet with Euforic's Rosien Herweijer at stand 25 to hear the latest about R4D and to subscribe to the newsfeeds of your choice.

You can also visit Euforic's research feedfinder page to subscribe to selected R4D newsfeeds.

What's your view on R4D?

R4D is a free access portal containing information about research programmes supported by DFID. It provides you with the latest information about research funded by DFID, including news, case studies and details of current and past research in over 20,000 project and document records.

We are conducting a short survey to help inform future improvements. It covers what you think of the current service from R4D, and what you would like to see on the R4D portal. The survey should take around 5 to 10 minutes to complete, depending how much you choose to say. It does not ask for personal, identifying data.

We need your views on R4D and thank you in advance for your input!

To start the survey, please click here.

This survey is being conducted on behalf of DFID, the UK Department for International Development.

Visit Euforic's research feedfinder page to subscribe to selected R4D newsfeeds

Who are we hearing?

Listening to multiple knowledges, attempts to redress the current bias.

In this open space session during the EADI IMWG 2009 meeting the group discussed what efforts are currently made to ensure that different groups are included in development research activities and that their views can be heard. This is the core concern of an EADI project funded by DGIS, the department for development cooperation at the Dutch Ministry for foreign Affairs.

The conversation was wide ranging around the issue of research information and communication and covered three elements:

• Providing access to research information from various groups;
  
• Bias in the research agendas set in research organisations;
  
• Communicating the outcomes of research to the community.

Providing access to research information
In discussing views of and access to research the following portals within the EADI network (which included also NGO research) were mentioned: research4development and search4dev.
Large portals are not the only way to present collections. Using custom search engines like focuss.info organisations have made increased access to views from their networks documents. Good examples are the Sangonet search from South african NGOs and the recently constructed Codesria search. Providing this information is only part of the story. Management need to be convinced of the issue.

There is not only a need to work on mobilising research but also promoting access to and creating demand for other sources of research, in the North as well as in the South. The internet may have provided more access to materials but it also means they can be shared whilst still work in progress. ICCO explained how their materials are shared before the final version is loaded onto Search for dev. ICCO research can be found on their wiki which is part of ComPart, their knowledge sharing platform.

Informing research agendas to make them relevant
How could we be sure that research is relevant and really served development goals?
There was the discussion of how donor agencies have produced a projectisation of research rather than organisations setting their own research agenda. This runs the risk of research agendas no longer being local and set by countries. Examples of these are the EADI Geneva conference last year and the UNRISD 2004 conference (see UNRISD News 27).

In discussing the last EADI conference the issue of action research and studies being more clearly of benefit to communities was raised. This was examined in some depth at the IKM emergent session at the EADI meeting.


Mike Powell introduces the IKMemergent project

Impact and uptake of research has been examined by several donors, one of the largest attempts is the DFID program 'Research Into Use' . This demonstrates a change in how research for development is perceived, with the recognition that participation in research leads to better communication. However, some participants were worried that there are few incentives to work in this way. As we were twittering this discussion we received the recommendation to look at RAAKS as an example of participatory research . In conjunction with discussing new innovative approaches we were encouraged to read Knowledge on the move.

Communicating the outcomes of research to the community
In addition to the difference that participatory research makes to communicating results to the community we heard of different approaches. For example how researchers had worked with the journalist Manuel Torres to write newspaper articles on the results of their research. Other materials were produced to reach the farming community.

A full description of the IKMemergent project and further details on each of these elements and more is available at IKMemergent.net and in previous articles on this blog.

by Chris Addison

See also Euforic newsfeeds on information, knowledge, communication, and from the IMWG 2009 workshop.

R4D, tool to access DFID-funded research

Over the last decade, DFID has invested around £700m in international development research. Hundreds of research partners around the world, running thousands of projects and programmes, have generated knowledge to shape our thinking on key development topics.

For the first time, information about this research is available on a free searchable database through DFID’s research portal (R4D). 

It has never been easy to find out what research topics, projects, and programmes DFID is funding or has funded. Researchers all over the world (and even DFID staff) had to rely on a network of personal contacts or inspired detective work to discover who was already working in a particular area, what was already known, and what lessons had been learned.

But now, R4D puts that information at your fingertips. Responding to a demand expressed by many DFID stakeholders for better and open access to all this information, R4D is a free on-line database containing information about research programmes supported by DFID.

R4D contains nearly 5,000 project records, and details of more than 20,000 research outputs. Every month we add new items, update existing information, and add historical documents as they become available. In addition to the database, R4D publishes research news and case studies, and keeps you up to date on the latest from DFID, including calls for new research programmes commissioned under the DFID Research Strategy 2008-2013.

R4D could become a vital link in your information chain, both for keeping in touch with other researchers’ work and for sharing your own DFID-funded research results.

Keep in touch ...

R4D’s monthly e-mail newsletter alerts you to the latest on R4D. There are also 60 themed e-mail alerts or feeds on specialist subjects, from agriculture to water, and more than 160 more related to specific countries. You can also produce your own tailored feeds, or let us know and we will do it for you.

Hot off the Press ...

DFID’s Research Strategy promised to spend up to 30% of its overall £1bn funding in ‘making research available, accessible and useable through a range of means’. This week sees the launch of R4D’s revamped Communications Corner. Its purpose? To provide practical support and guidance to anyone wanting their research to be communicated effectively. A weekly CommsCorner Blog aims to inspire with examples of innovative communications, both from within the DFID research community and from further afield. A companion blog R4D Podium Posts invites DFID researchers to share communications approaches, tactics, successes and challenges with other researchers. Take a look!

Ten ingredients help take up development research

In early July, Euforic contributed to a workshop to discuss ways to extend the communication and uptake of development research in Southern Africa. Organized by R4D and DFID, the session helped identify 10 key ingredients for a better take up of research:

1. Media and policy: Research communicators can rely on journalists to communicate with policy shapers, both by informing public opinion and hence politicians, and by directly briefing the beneficiaries of the research.
   
2. Two worlds: Journalists work in the active voice, scientists in the passive; with different vocabularies it is not an easy task to link the two.
   
3. Impact: Too few organisations attempt to demonstrate the impact of research communication.
   
4. Visibility: Many organizations need to make their invisible research outputs visible, particularly on the web.
   
5. The quote: Journalists want personal quotes from contacts. But, there is a danger that celebrity researchers are overused and can make ill-informed comment.
   
6. Training: Journalists need support and training to find and report on research, and to support researchers to work with journalists.
   
7. The story: Research clearly carries further in the media when there is a human interest story. Some research themes lend themselves to storytelling more than others.
   
8. Technologies: While new technologies bring new opportunities to promote research, the classic skills are still required.
   
9. Skills sets: The range of actors engaged in research and communication has increased. Technical skills, communication and information management all play a role.
   
10. Ownership: Research can be communicated more readily when there is ownership, either by the benefitting community or by policy makers in the country commissioning a national report.

by Chris Addison

More:

Euforic newsfeed on information and knowledge

Making research real - research news from IPS Africa

R4D news on research communication

R4D in plain English

During the Euforic/EADI case study workshop ‘Showcasing knowledge and information services’ Chris Addison (Euforic) presented the Research for Development portal - R4D. R4D is an database containing information about research programmes supported by the British Department for International Development (DFID). The portal contains an elaborated search engine to find information about projects and partner organisations, it offers thematic rss-feeds, e-mail alerts and video messages.

See Mr Addison's presentation:

| View | Upload your own

Read more stories from the workshop

See the Euforic dossier and the feed on Information, Knowledge and Communication.

Subscribe toR4D newsfeeds and visit the R4D portal

DFID launches new research strategy

On 22 April 2008, the Secretary of State for International Development Rt. Hon Douglas Alexander MP launched the new research strategy for the UK Department for International Development (DFID).



The new strategy focuses on 6 priority themes - agriculture, climate change, governance, growth, health, and future horizons. It also gives significant attention to research capacity strengthening and research communication and uptake.

Listen to video reflections on the strategy; read commentaries from research leaders. Sign up for email alerts on the strategy

EC support to research for development

Paolo Sarfati of DG Development in the European Commission recently met with Euforic to explain the Commission's current approach to research for development, and to agricultural research in particular.



The Commission has a particular focus on agriculture and Africa because these are seen as key to addressing poverty. The Commission supports research at the international level through the CGIAR; at the regional level through FARA, and at subregional levels through ASARECA, CORAF and SADC/FARN.

Sarfati outline a four point approach to research for development:



First, the intention is to focus in Europe on research serving the MDGs, for example research on health, agriculture, climate change, and energy. Second, is a focus on strengthening infrastructure and the capacity of Southern research organisations. Third is to address the issue of brain drain of southern researchers to the north by ensuring "brain circulation" as has proved so successful in emerging nations. The fourth area is coherence.

More:

• Euforic development research dossier
  
• Euforic research feedfinder
• Research for development portal
• CIMRC consortium
• DFID's new research strategy

by Chris Addison

Euforic helps extend reach of DFID R4D portal

As a partner in the CIMRC consortium with CABI and ComsConsult, Euforic contributes to the "Research for Development" platform of DFID.

In 2007, we worked on four main elements:

• Newsfeeds on over 50 subjects and all target countries - see the full list at http://del.icio.us/r4dfeedfinder
  


• Subject views for each major subject area on the portal, combining news, case studies, projects and documents


• Marketing R4D content and services at international meetings: for example at the Web2fordev conference in Rome, the European Development Days in November, and at several Brussels Development Briefings.


• Knowledge Organization to enhance the search services and database structure behind the R4D site.


• DFID Research Strategy, helping to promote wider participation.
  

More:

• Research for development portal
• Euforic development research dossier
  
• Euforic research feedfinder
  
• CIMRC consortium

Extending a consultation on DFID’s research strategy

In 2007, the Department for International Development (DFID) developed a new research strategy, for which it launched a public consultation.

Beginning in September, Euforic was contracted by DFID’s Central Research Department to publicise the e-consultation process; extend the reach of the consultation to Southern research suppliers, users and knowledge intermediaries; and enable feedback and interaction among different elements of the consultation process.

This was a small project that utilized 1) the power of some new ‘social’ media to capture contributions and 2) the reach of existing networks beyond DFID’s immediate orbit.

The main ‘tools’ used were a blog and a Dgroup. Email and RSS alerts for the consultation were set up using Feedburner.

We started by ‘populating’ the blog with the various consultation questions, announcing these widely, then encouraging people to contribute their thoughts and experiences using the ‘comment’ functionality of the blog.

We identified networks and groups likely to be interested in the issues and to be willing to re-disseminate information about the consultation and the questions to their stakeholders. We also contacted some groups in developing countries asking for similar outreach and encouraging them to organize a small national consultation if desired.

120 comments were contributed on the Blog/Dgroup. Two organizations also contributed substantial papers with comments:

- DNet Bangaladesh
- Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa.

All of these contributions were brought together into a report and provided to DFID.

See R4D consultation page

Visit the blog.

Sign up for updates on the DFID research strategy consultation