Building a knowledge portal through Open Data

The Open Knowledge Hub (OKHub) is a collaborative initiative led by IDS to make good quality research accessible in an original way.

In its essence the OKHub is a “database of open-licensed metadata (bibliographic data and links) about research documents, organisations, and other materials.” Around 20 knowledge partners such as Eldis and 3iE contribute their content to the platform, including titles, URLs, abstracts and summaries, keywords, etc, of the research publications in their catalogues. To date, the OKHub contains over 20767 documents. You can browse and search this wealth of information by different criteria (e.g. themes, languages, regions and countries, etc.) on the Content Explorer.

But collecting, aggregating and organizing this global content is only half of what the OKHub offers. In fact, the OKHub uses the same open infrastructure and technology to allow you to use its content to set up your own knowledge services. Services such as BRIDGE and the Gender Hub are integrating OKHub contents to expand their online collections.

Earlier this year I supported the development of a prototype website that makes use of the OKHub dataset and functionality to presents selected research on Challenges to Development in the Arab World.

Setting up the prototype 

The OKHub offers functionality for developers and site ‘builders’ to re-use its content. You can use a simple HTML widget to display selected resources from the OKHub catalogue. Alternatively, if your website is built on Wordpress or Drupal, you can use a plugin to seamlessly import selected contents from the Hub into your own site.

For the Challenges to Development prototype, we experimented both with solutions. Eventually, as the site is build on Wordpress, we downloaded and installed the OKHub plugin to import around 140 free Open Licensed content items relevant for the 10 key issues covered by the prototype. These contents are aggregated on the resources page and presented separately on each thematic page. 

Together with this open content imported from the OKHub, the proof of concept also provides two spaces for content creation and curation: a section to present featured publications and a blogging space to share relevant highlights from the MENA region.

This project was rather short and straightforward, but there are three key lessons that I think it’s worth sharing.

A business case for the OKHub initiative and platform 

Actually, two. On the one hand, as knowledge producer or intermediary, you can make use of the OKHub technology and infrastructure to contribute the content of your organization, thus increasing its visibility, availability and accessibility. On the other hand, The WP plugin has huge potential, as it allows non programmers to easily import content and augment their own knowledge service, or create a new one.

The human factor

Open content and automation alone are clearly not enough. If you want to maximise the chance of research uptake, the human factor is key. This means using a moderator with the required regional or thematic knowledge for quality control purposes and to tailor imported content to specific stakeholders. But it also means having resources to create your own original content, to curate and repackage existing content, to build and animate a community around your service, to ensure users are interested and engaged.

Tech for the (non-)techie

The HTML widget and WP plugin enable less technical people, with a basic knowledge of HTML and CMS, to “plug-and-play” and build applications which meet their needs. However, you may still need some programming skills, to be able to fully integrate OKHub content on your own site. In my case, there was a conflict between the WP plugin and the site theme, resulting in individual records not fully displaying, or altering the site layout. Thanks to our colleague Tony Murray for stepping in and getting well beyond where my technical knowledge ends!

Overall, the prototype offers a good proof of concept for the idea that open knowledge and collaborative approaches can help extend outreach and uptake of research knowledge.

Do you know other examples on initiative of knowledge services based on Open Data to sharing and use development research content? Let us know in the comments below!

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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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.