For the upcoming IKM Workshop on Linked Data, taking place in November in Oxford, I’ve been exploring the process and possibilities of putting a development-focussed social science dataset online as linked open data.

What is linked open data?

We can work through a definition backwards:

Data (at least for our purposes) is a series of facts recorded in a structure way. The dataset I’ve been working with in this project has been records from the Peru instance of the 2010 Health Survey of the Young Lives Longitudinal study. Essentially, it’s a large table of around 650 young people’s responses to a number of health-related questions.

Open. The openness of data has three parts: accessibility (can you access the data easily, generally over the Internet); license (are you allowed by the terms and conditions or license to access and use the data); format (is the data in an ‘open’ format so you can read and work with it without needing proprietary software).

Linked. The ‘four rules of linked data‘ put forward by Tim Berners-Lee set out an approach to publishing data which makes connections between different datasets, generally linking them up across the Internet. For example, instead of simply stating in our dataset that the information is about “Peru”, where Peru is just a word in a table, we can use the URL http://ontologi.es/place/PE (PE being an ISO standard code for Peru) to identify Peru – giving a shared ‘key’ that could be used to link our data about Peru to other people who have used the same key. The vision of linked data goes a step further however, suggesting that those shared identifiers (e.g. http://ontologi.es/place/PE) should return information about the thing they are an identifier for, ideally as ‘data’ and as ‘data’ that makes further links to other sources of data.

In fact, if you go to http://ontologi.es/place/PE you won’t find anything for human readers at all. Instead, you’ll get a downloadable file that looks something like this. You can see that it gives a name for the thing (the ‘resource’) being identified (between the tags), and it lists ‘parts’ of Peru – regions and sub-areas. It also, towards the bottom of the list, tells us that the identifier http://ontologi.es/place/PE is identical () the resource http://www.geonames.org/countries/#PE so we could go and look up some data from there too.

The way this linked data is represented uses RDF – ‘Resource Descriptor Framework’. RDF is not a single file format (there are many different ways of writing an RDF document, just as there are many different file-formats and programmes for creating a spreadsheet with), but it aims to create ‘self-describing data’ and it allows everything in a dataset to be annotated and linked together in different ways. For example, whereas in a spreadsheet if I want to tell you what a column heading means (e.g. ‘SMKPRNR3′), I need to write additional documentation. By contrast, in an RDF document I can annotate the ‘SMKPRNR3′ property with a label, comment and links to other sources of information about that variable.

Linked Open Data
Putting all these elements together we get an approach to publishing data on the Internet that makes data accessible, tries to make connections between different datasets, and allows other people to access and re-use the data that has been shared.

What have we done with the Young Lives Data?

Using one small sub-set of the Young Lives data (the 2010 Health Survey data from Peru) I’ve:

• Created descriptions of all the variables in RDF format;
• Converted the young people’s responses into RDF format;
• Loaded all this data into a server which allows queries to be run against it and for the data to be expored;
• Added extra annotations to some of the questions;
• Created some summary statistics from the data and recorded those in RDF format as well;
• Looked for comparable statistics in open data, and, finding none, converted a few comparison statistics into RDF also;

The Young Lives data is social science research data. This is quite different from much of the linked open data that is already out there. The linked open data cloud diagram shows many sources of linked open data available right now – and you will see that much of the available data is ‘data about things’ (places, events, music, publications etc.), rather than research data. It’s also very UK and US-centric, with very little development sector data (if any), and global data, available.

This has meant having to think about how to represent the Young Lives data and how best to get value out of creating links with other datasets.

We’ve not yet addressed questions of ‘license’ openness with this data demonstrator.

What was involved?

Choosing ontologies and schema
One of the biggest tasks so far has been choosing how to represent the data. Ideally we want:

• To use shared identifiers and terms in representing the data (shared ontologies)
• To structure the data using shared conventions to ease comparison with other data (shared schema);
• To make the data as self-describing as possible; and make the data easy to query
• To use URLs for resources in the data which (a) could provide more information when looked up (dereferenced); and (b) are re-useable across different datasets and projects.

RDFS
Some of the widest used conventions include RDFS (Resource Descriptor Framework Schema) which provides properties for our data such as rdfs:label and rdfs:comment. So, for example, whenever we represent a question in the data, we give it an rdfs:label property of the question name. You can see this below, where I’ve created the identifier http://data.younglives.org.uk/variables/CMBRFRR3 to refer to a particular variable, and then I’ve given it a label using the label property from RDFS.

 rdfs:label "Compared to your brothers you have less freedom to leave the house when you want"@en.

(http://data.younglives.org.uk/variables/CMBRFRR3 doesn’t actually return data right now – as our demonstration server isn’t running there right now, so we’re breaking the law of open data about providing ‘dereferenceable URIs’ that allow you to look up more data – but it’s not ‘illegal’ to use arbitrary URLs as identifiers even if the webserver they point at isn’t returning data.)

SKOS
Many of the responses in the Young Lives survey data involve young people picking an answer from a list. These lists of responses (code lists) can be represented using SKOS – ‘Simple Knowledge Organising SYSTEM???’.

SKOS is widely used to maintain knowledge bases. Right now we’re creating our own lists of concepts (apart from for gender where we re-use a list from the Statistical Data and Metadata Exchange standard – SDMX). But if someone was maintaining a list of relevant concepts online we could simply point to and re-use their concepts for some questions. We could also use the ‘OWL’ (Ontology Web Language) term ‘sameAs’ to tell any computers or humans who understand OWL that our concept list is the same as someone else’s.

Given many questions in the Young Lives dataset were drawn from other studies – we can imagine an eco-system of re-usable survey concepts and constructs that would allow humans and machines to more easily find and interrogate comparable data.

DDI and SDMX
There are in fact many efforts already to make survey and statistic data more easily comparable – and to set standards for exchanging data, and, importantly, the meta-data that goes with it describing how it was sourced, collected, manipulated etc.

The two main standards are SDMX, primarily for large-scale statistical data and time-series, and DDI (Data Documentation Initiative). These are both XML based standards (rather than linked-data and RDF standards), but efforts are underway to create RDF representations of both, with the SDMX efforts far more advanced so far.

SDMX has a number of useful ‘concepts’ (such as a shared concept for gender), and defines a set of ‘dimensions’ on which data might be analysed (e.g. time period; area covered), so when we define the data structure for our aggregate statistics, we make links with these parts of SDMX.

For example, the fragment below is part of a data structure definition of summary statistics on smoking prevalence (the Prefix statements shows all the different vocabularies being used).

@prefix yls: .
@prefix sdmx: .
@prefix sdmx-dimension:  .
@prefix sdmx-concept:  .
@prefix geo: .
@prefix rdfs:  .
@prefix qb: .

yls:refArea  a rdf:Property, qb:DimensionProperty;
    rdfs:label "Area statistic refers to"@en;
    rdfs:subPropertyOf sdmx-dimension:refArea;
    rdfs:range geo:Country;
    qb:concept sdmx-concept:refArea .

Data Cubes
Representing statistical data turns out not to be entirely straightforward (If you want to see how tricky it can be – just look at a government spreadsheet and take note of all the footnotes and annotations needed to property describe what the data is saying). You need to find a structure which allows almost everything to be annotated, whilst keeping the data as simple and easy to query as possible (i.e. you want to avoid very deep ‘tree’ structures where the final value you read is nested inside many layers of explanation and annotation).

The RDF data cube vocabulary is currently under development, but seemed to be a fairly good starting point for modelling the Young Lives data, particularly the summary data.

For the individual survey responses (micro-data) each question answer is recorded as a ‘measure’ against an individual data cube ‘Observation’.

For the aggregate data we have generated, a more conventional data cubes consisting of a number of ‘dimensions’ (location, age, gender) and then a measure (e.g. smoking prevalence) has been created, and a data-structure definition created also.

You can see in the fragment below that our observation comes from the ‘health2010-younglives-smoking’ dataset, which has the ‘dsd-smokingStats’ data structure definition.

   yls:smoking-PE-2010-14-Female a qb:Observation;
		qb:dataSet yld:health2010-younglives-smoking ;
		yls:refAge "14" ; yls:refArea geo:PE ;
		yls:refPeriod ns0:2010 ;
		yls:smokingPrevalence "0.11" ;
		sdmx-dimension:sex sdmx-code:sex-F.

	yls:health-2010-statistics-smoking a qb:DataSet;
		qb:structure yls:dsd-smokingStats .

If we could find comparable data with a similar data structure definition (or, ideally, an identical data structure definition), then making comparisons between these two datasets becomes a lot easier.

By publishing our data structure definition we also make it available for others to re-use.

The right representation?
I’ve been on a steep learning curve whilst creating this representation of the data – so there are probably many flaws and things that could be improved. I’ll be continuing to develop the data model over the coming weeks in the run up to Novembers workshop.

Converting the data
The process of finding a way to represent the data was an iterative one – and one that involved a lot of searching, researching and, essentially, looking at what other people had done and at other data resources we might want to link to, in order to select the most appropriate ontologies and structures of data to use.

For the actual conversion of the question descriptions and data I turned to the RAP RDF libraries for PHP, which make it relatively straightforward to write scripts which will convert our data.

In the future more tools for conversion into RDF may be available. For example, Google Refine is developing as a platform which might make authoring RDF easier – but for now the approach was pretty manual.

Displaying the data
Once the data was in RDF format, I needed to make it available to query.

This can be done by just providing the RDF files on a web server for people to download and explore in their own software. However, to make the data query-able across the Internet we needed a SPARQL server.

I’ve made use of Virtuoso, as there was good documentation on how to set it up as a data server to interoperate with OntoWiki as a front-end. OntoWiki is a wiki-like interface for browsing RDF data and editing it – adding new properties to RDF resources, or easily importing new data from a web-based interface.

The demonstration server is a temporary virtual server, so may not be available all the time, but at practicalparticipation.dyndns.org:8890/sparql you should find a SPARQL endpoint which can be used to query the data (which is in the http://data.younglives.org.uk/ graph)*, and at http://practicalparticipation.dyndns.org/ontowiki is an interface for browsing the young lives dataset.

*I’ll explain what this all means in a later post.

What now?

So, the data is converted.

It’s represented in a way that makes use of links between different ontologies for describing data.

But, right now, there’s not much related data available in standard formats to link to.

So the next step is to explore the possible linkages to other datasets more – and to build some visualisations on top of the data that demonstrate what is possible when we can draw in linked resources more effectively.

As Richard Cygniak put’s it in a recent review of open government data (slide 32), triplication alone isn’t very useful – it’s what we do with it…

Questions, suggestions and ideas welcome…

Mind maps and concept maps
The meeting had two main components. The first comprised presentations of how mind maps and concept maps are being used in tertiary education by InHolland and other Dutch universities and organisations. The second part comprised a brainstorm – in a world cafe format – on the power of visualisation on knowledge management.

The first part comprised how software called Inspiration was being used by InHolland. The  second presentation described the use by Leiden University Medical Centre of concept maps, making links between clinical and biomedical knowledge explicit. In the light of IKM Emergent’s attempts to bridge various knowledge divides, I thought this sounded very interesting. Concept maps were useful in this regard because they can be used to make explicit knowledge more visible, based on mapping by multidisciplinary teams. They were also used to link clinical concepts with biomedical ones. Interestingly, it appeared that older people and experts had quite a lot of difficulty with this exercise because they find it difficult to look laterally at things and to access their implicit knowledge.

Brainstorm
In the brainstorm session that followed, one of the findings that most interested me was that visualisation can also play a role in codification and personalisation of knowledge, it supports out-of-the-box thinking, can play a role in negotiations of meaning and, because it replicates more clearly our own non-linear thought processes, it supports non-linear forms of work.

New ways of presentation
My fellow brainstormers told me about new visualisation software. The one that particularly caught my attention was something called Prezi and I thought I’d give it a try because I needed to make a presentation to my colleagues at Context in July.

Prezi is a new sort of presentation and can be used like PowerPoint which, although innovative in its time, is now rather standard and linear. For example, I like the way that PowerPoint reminds me of what I want to say, helps me structure my thoughts and takes the attention away from me but it does look a bit old and stuffy these days (unless you do something really special with it of course.)

Prezi
You can see the presentation I made to my colleagues All you every wanted to know about Sarah’s work and didn’t dare to ask. The presentation worked really well by using the trial version on my laptop but you need to navigate through it with either the arrows at the bottom of the presentation or with your own cursor keys, and not start panning through (that only makes you feel seasick, believe me!) Everyone I have shown the presentation has become terribly excited about Prezi too and I’m going to use it again and again. It’s so much fun and and so creative!

The key points that came up in the strands of work I was involved on this second and third day of the meeting:

• More attention will be paid to communication: internal communication to increase the awareness of all IKM-E members about each other’s work but also more external communication to engage with a wider group of development actors. The role of social media has been raised as a crucial point in case to leverage the great work of IKM-E to the wider world. Along with the Giraffe, IKM-E blog and the wiki, there is potential to use del.icio.us, to use Twitter (anyways I’ve been tweeting around the hash tag #ikm-e) and perhaps Slideshare or other tools.
• The various strands of the programme will come together in some respect to reinforce each other: ripples of participation, local content/knowledge, emergence, traducture, multiple knowledges coming together in an approach that recognises complexity and power issues.
• In the last 18 months of this programme, the IKM group will come up with various practical outputs which can be mobilised and used more easily by development agents to reflect on and adapt values, behaviours and practices: books, guidelines, checklists (of critical questions, questions and more questions), workshops, video explanations of our work, an overall narrative for the IKM programme that offers a comprehensive understanding of the issues we are questioning etc.
• One interesting output that we will be working on is the apply our work to the current change process in which a couple of development organisations are involved, to see how helpful it is and help these organisations reflect critically on their approach to knowledge-focused development work. This activity will culminate with a learning workshop in 2011 where we may prepare additional action research activities as part of a future programme.

• The IKM-2 programme in preparation will not just advocate for multiple knowledges and the likes but will actually consistently practice what it preaches and organise joint action-research work / collective inquiries (including participants from NGOs, knowledge institutes, community members, donor agency representatives, governmental agents, artists and the media) on a number of topics. This will help us: demonstrate the power, potential and strategic value but also the challenges of bringing together multiple knowledges. It will also help us develop a multiple accountability system that stimulates us to change perspectives and practices through joint action and ownership.
• This future programme will continue operating as a network of passionate and capable individuals creating opportunities for IKM to build upon existing work or new ideas, but it will also establish more firm relations with a wide variety of networks (and journals such as the KM4Dev journal) and institutions to accompany and strengthen our questioning work.

This has been an extremely juicy two final days with a delicious fruit salad of insights and ideas, approaches and concepts. The academic head and practice-oriented arms of IKM-Emergent are still working in a somewhat disjointed fashion, but that is as natural as waking up and not yet having adjusted body coordination; nonetheless the body is wobbling on and indeed moving forward. We have been dreaming profoundly and we are now putting our dreams to action. Let’s hope we can soon take a good walk and later on run to co-create relevant next (not best) practices of sustainable and people-centred development.

By the way, some pictures of this IKM-Emergent meeting are available on: http://www.flickr.com/groups/ikm_emergent/pool/

The programme has evolved since then and a number of things are coalescing on this first day of the all-peeps IKM-Emergent  workshop (which brings together the three working groups, but also a number of new guests that are working on issues related to IKM-E and/or that will be working for the programme from now on).

A lot of very interesting ideas and insights came out from the wide variety of participants but what stroke me as key converging points are the following:

• Dynamics of change: A lot of us were wondering how to bring about change? Should we have a very upfront / head-on approach to change or should we rather follow more subversive ways of tilting the development system?
• Related to this, we seem to agree on the concept of intention as the driving force behind a lot of development work. In a change process, our words (i.e. lip service or love declarations to change) matter much less than our real intention to stimulate change.
• A lot of IKM-Emergent work seems to be concerned with raising awareness about development dynamics and biases at large and about specific lenses or approaches in particular: multiple knowledges, traducture (more on this later but I would describe this as the socio-cultural translation of concepts and approaches, not just the loss of meaning that is usually part of the linguistic transaction of translation), emergence etc.
• As in the launch event of the Change Alliance (read this blog post about it), the key difference between agency-driven and civic-driven movements. We need to support civic-driven movements – going beyond the faddism of just supporting them as part of the latest craze. Instead, what do we do to implicitly or explicitly to support these movements?
• The importance of critical analysis and questioning which can be the only focus area we provide as ‘agency’: we need to move from setting up water pumps and delivering food onto helping all development actors equip themselves with critical reflexivity as part of the survival toolkit that stimulates self-empowerment and (less biased) development. It is this reflexivity that helps us challenge ourselves, our discourse, our practices, our being.
• Accountability as a central practice that goes way beyond upward accountability towards donors. We need to be aware that we are (or should be) accountable to one another in all our development transactions and it is that accountability that generates the trust necessary to engage in development relationships and to open up a space for joint critical inquiry.

There was actually a lot more content in the discussion but these items stick out as pointers that came back time and again in the presentations and conversations.

This was day one of the workshop and the rest of the workshop sounds very promising! On the menu on day 2: looking back at the legacy of IKM-Emergent, limitations of the programme and the possible foundations of an IKM-Emergent 2. Keep watching this space!

WG1 spent between a year and 18 months working out its own projects and contributing to the overall IKME programme , which was then subsequently submitted to the Dutch government. WG1 participants discussed how to develop different case studies and how to work together assuming that the collaboration between group members would add depth to the work that the whole group did. For Dan intimate contact and profound enquiry would contribute to the sustainability of the work. Dan was also interested in weaving the translation methodologies work of WG1 into the practice of the World Social Forum (WSF) and the 2010 World Congress being organised by the International Drama/Theatre and Education Association (IDEA). Although the group had only just discussed the concepts, a first outline proposal submitted to the WSF was rejected. However, members of WG1 continued to talk about mutual visits and how they might work collectively. Discussions revolved around how to define quality and outcomes and the collective enterprise. An equal amount of money was apportioned between group members to carry out their case studies.

The Brazil project proposal is to undertake research with 40, now subsequently 46, community educators who are themselves students of Pedagogia do Campo, and who are active within the communities from which they originate. Using video and a variety of artistic languages, the case study aims to document different approaches to personal and community transformation through self-knowledge. So far the community educators have met six times to develop and record their research methods and will ultimately produce a CD and a book. The role of Dan and Manoela, his colleague, is to work alongside the educators to help amplify discussions between case study participants and support their development.

In working together the 46 programme participants have also collectively designed a contract which defines the professional relationships between each other. This implies a new model of ethical responsibility and pedagogical principles in the agreements.

The project is embedded in a university, since all of the participants are themselves undertaking a degree that is part of Brazilian government policy, committed to the development and self-determination of the landless and of rural communities. This degree course takes place in the holidays between school and university semesters and arises out of previous government literacy and technical programmes. What this particular IKME project enables is further meetings outside the university context and the production of a collective, self-determined outcome.

As the project has developed it has drawn on the experience of the participants to develop areas of enquiry, discussion and further development. For example, four of the educators were involved in a road accident which resulted in the death of a young pedestrian. The driver was forced into hiding and his passengers chose to remain silent, out of grave concerns for their personal safety. This seriously affected the continuity of the project. This incident became the focus of collective reflection and reflexivity and was subsequently transformed into a university course on ethical pedagogy. The course addresses the question as to how best protect people who are unequal in the societies in which they act. Dan’s own ability to work with this situation arose from his own long experience of conflict transformation; his involvement in IKME and has gone on to help inform the materials which are being produce for IKME.

One of the things the project has focused on is the development of a production structure to help project participants deal with and discuss their realities. Part of the work is finding methods through which they can begin to organise their knowledge. The book Dan and colleagues is producing presents the ideas from the exploration of this pedagogy and how it has been taken up by the 46 participants. In doing so, they have attempted to recover their sensitisation to the recovery of knowledge beyond the usual rationalisation. They draw on narratives from their own cultures to inform and shape their experience. Colleagues have attempted to take up this pedagogy in a range of different frameworks in order to explore how they might live ethically in an unethical situation. They have tried to meet every 6 months and in meeting they are exploring the economy of solidarity as they exchange knowledges and the opportunity to learn from each other. The university where these educators are studying has agreed to adapt their timetable in order to accommodate this project, since they have been able to recognise its importance. The project participants are themselves taking up these ideas with their own communities and at least 20 others. 25 of them have attended the WSF to talk about their work. This has enabled links to be made both nationally and internationally and has led to the participants feeling more confident about the form their research is taking and the knowledge it is producing.

The rural educators take up their research on issues of land, health, food production and sustainable development. Just before the project began, one of the participants, a mother of two, was murdered by her husband for choosing to become a literacy worker. During the course, leaders from their communities have been sentenced to imprisonment and faced death-threats for transforming abandoned land into camps, schools and allotments for the homeless. By taking on issues surrounding the democratisation of land they are engaging with the toughest question in Brazil.

The Communications Strategy in 2007 placed a lot of emphasis on the the ‘stickiness’ of ideas and the need for IKM to develop an elevator pitch. Stickiness relates to how ideas stick and was developed by two brothers, Chip and Dan Heath, in their book, Made to stick: why some ideas survive and others die. In their conception, sticky ideas are those that are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible and emotional. And somehow linked to this in my mind is the elevator pitch: a short overview of an idea for a product, service, or project. The name reflects the fact that an elevator pitch should be possible to deliver in the time span of an elevator ride, meaning in a maximum of 30 seconds and in 130 words or fewer (Source: Wikipedia).

Although the original Communication Strategy was much enamoured of ‘stickiness’ and the elevator pitch, I now have my serious doubts as to whether these are the answer for IKM or for anyone trying to communicate complex messages. In addition, both of these approaches come from the tradition of ‘knowedge as truth’ and what we are increasingly understanding is that knowledge as truth is not important at all. Instead, it the sharing and negotiation of meaning that are important. To quote from Harry Jones’ 2009 joint ODI/IKM working paper:

While the translation and ‘transfer’ of knowledge have become widespread terms and are the focus of a number of initiaitives, some argue that the term is inappropriate. Many point to the complex and contested nature of applied social research which makes claims to stable, ‘objective’ and acontextual knowledge, embedded in some paradigms of evidence-based policy and knowledge-transfer, less appropriate (eg. Brown 2007, Walter et al 2008). Instead, it is important to recognise the contextual nature of knowledge and the complexities of its ‘use’. This means looking at knowledge interaction and the messy nature of engagements between actors with diverse types of knowledge. There is a growing literatuer advocating ínteraction’and collaboration as key activities to link knowledge and policy (Jones 2009, p. 25)

So what does all this mean for IKM’s communications? I think it means a new emphasis on personal interactions with those outside the programme as a way of developing shared meaning, rather than thinking that a elevator pitch or presenting IKM’s messages simply will do the trick. And more emphasis on developing the community of practice around IKM because it is only in the interaction between these individuals – and their interaction with those outside the programme – that current approaches to information and knowledge be changed.

It’s quite interesting that this post is also reflected in the current discussion on monitoing and evaluation (M&E) of km which is taking place on The Giraffe: Monitoring knowledge (management): an impossible task.

Not only are they very complex because they are concerned with what is a very complex field – information and knowledge for development – but also because they are not clear guidelines but, rather, they are a series of guiding principles.

This complexity – and I use this word in a standard, English dictionary way, with no deeper meaning! – poses serious challenges for IKM’s Communications Strategy but more about that in my next post in this series. In the meantime, here is a abridged version of IKM’s messages:

Multiple Knowledges
Although always implicit, there has been considerable development in IKM’s understanding of the nature and importance of the concept of ‘multiple knowledges’ or ‘epistemic diversity’.  At one level, this is almost a common sense response to the daily negotiations across disciplines and ways of life which take place within the development sector.  Valerie Brown has further helped IKM’s understanding of this with her demonstration of how types of knowledge are so often linked to roles.

Knowledge landscapes
IKM has been working on the conception of multiple knowledges in the context of the disconnection between policy, practice and academic research in the development sector.

Bridges
One aspect of using multiple knowledges in practice is the importance of the bridges – human, organisational and technical – which need to exist if gaps between knowledges are to be crossed.

Local content
Local content is important and it needs to be valued by both local communities and development organisations.

Implications of non-linearity
Notions of development practice which envisage direct cause and effect relationships between input and output in environments untainted by any other influences are entirely hallucinatory.  Unanticipated external events, the unpredictability of life (health, family, change), and the possibility – even desirability – that new factors and opportunities will emerge out of the experience of doing whatever is planned, coming into contact and relating with the other actors involved mean that the lifespan of any firm plan is always limited.

Critique of research ‘for development’
The structure of research ‘for development’ is seriously dysfunctional.

Tools for handling multiple knowledges
Good information desing – including both means of design and means of expression – has the potenial to greatly strengthen the transmission signal.

In this post Sula Batsu co-ordinator Kemly Camacho talks about  the work her organisation is doing with communities in Costa Rica.

About Sulá Batsú

Sulá Batsú is a co-operative of new-generation professionals, which has now been going for five years.  We are a group of 20 and are also interested in exploring the co-operative model though sustained reflection. Our organisation is partly a response to the unemployment problem in Costa Rica where graduates are unable to find jobs locally, or are sucked out to work in northern countries and institutions or multi-nationals. The co-operative offers employment opportunities for young professionals from two principal domains, social science and ICT.

When co-operative members reflect on the model they stop working and talk about the group interactions and what these mean for the work, since we all own the enterprise. We use a mentor who sits with us to collect our reflections twice a year during the two to three days that we sit together. We also take account of power relationships between us. There is a 12 month trial period before people can apply to be new members of the co-operative, which involves asking the existing assembly of members to be accepted. The collective decides everything. Currently we have more women members than men, since men seem to prefer to have more things under their own control and to manage contract workers rather than work with other co-operative workers. We also have a strong social dynamic in the co-op and spend time eating and partying together.

In the interim we have a strong capacity development programme for associates which can involve teaching languages, research training or supporting them to do MAs or PhDs. We have yet to decide as a co-operative whether putting people on academic courses means we should then oblige them to stay with us for a number of years.

Sulá Batsú is a research organisation that works as a collection of projects. We use a project management model that will draw on 2-3 people at a time according to what the project needs: no one ever works by themselves, and no team will ever be the same from project to project. We are action research oriented with a focus on knowledge sharing and connecting multiple knowledges. It is our intention to connect multiple knowledges by creating spaces for this to happen. Our goal is always to produce something: a policy, an action, a programme of work. Our aim is to enhance the collective, to amplify the social nature of communities and to develop new methods for achieving this. Our intention is to develop training methods and trainers who can work with these approaches and to be conscious of the centrality of power to these discussions.

We are not naïve that sharing knowledge is always a good thing for communities. For example Big Pharma has a habit of eliciting knowledge from indigenous communities and then commercialising it. We have to keep coming back to the question as to whose knowledge we are dealing with and how to respect it and not get caught in the middle of a conflict. We are interested in the question as to how to do business with open knowledge. On the one hand we publish everything we produce, put it online and believe in the creative commons: on the other hand we have to be a sustainable organisation. We have researched this topic and have explored our own model but we are still talking these issues through.

Nor do we think that local content is particularly helpful because the idea of content says nothing about the processes which have produced it: these are just as important. We are interested in the process of local knowledge production because we are concerned that local communities should come to understand themselves better and perhaps increase their self-esteem through hearing their own voices. The idea of local content is one aspect of this but is the product. In helping communities to develop more self-knowledge we are aware that ICT is only one medium for doing so. We are concerned also to help communities strengthen their own media.

Sulá Batsú and IKME

To do this we work with local infomediaries so that they can assist with the transformation of their own communities. With IKME we have three projects: in the first project we have been working with a group of children aged 7-11 in an urban area for the last nine months or so. In the second project we are working with housewives in a peri-urban area which has a large Nicaraguan immigrant population, and in the third project we are working with young people in a mixture of rural, peri-urban and urban areas which focuses on what life is like for young people in these areas.

One aspect of this project is to encourage research about how these communities became: who is there and how did they get there? What are the most important events and places as far as they concerned in their community’s history? The intention of the projects is to develop the capacity of infomediaries both to research and retell these community histories. Because they are discovering information that is relevant to them and retelling it in their own way it has more meaning for them. In order to identify these infomediaries,  Sulabatsu has been working through local organisations which have an established presence and are recognised and respected by the local communities.

The training of infomediaries involves developing their ability to use Web 2 and oral and visual languages. They experiment with how to create stories using research methods which depend upon interviews and group interpretation. We accompany them so that they can do this. There are three stages: the ‘capturing’ of knowledge, the valuing of it, then the ‘return’ of this knowledge to the local communities who produced it. The infomediaries choose the topic of research: for the young people it was the history of the river which runs through the community. The housewives haven’t yet chosen their topic. To ‘capture’ knowledge there is a lot of work with digital cameras and other digital capture devices. To value it infomediaries organise community meetings to ask people what they value about what has been collected through discussion and argument. Each community has a blog and a research diary which tries to reflect the language and format which is appropriate to the community. The infomediaries and communities decide what is most relevant to them.

The children have chosen games as a topic. With them we have created three different games using photos which tell the history of the community. They have also been working on a performance as a way of ‘returning’ the knowledge to the community. Elsewhere we are using radio and big format photography. The young people want to develop a video but we are still negotiating how this might be ‘returned’ to the community. It is usually the ‘return’ to the community which is the weakest aspect of what we are doing.

The credibility of the local organisations ensures our credibility when we are working with local communities. In the project with children we are working with 3 schools and an environmental organisation. In the second project we are working with a development CBO and in the third project we are working with an organisation concerned with issues of liberty. The community blogs are linked to the websites of the local CBOs/NGOs.

One step of the project informs the next step, so in that sense we don’t know where the projects are heading, although we have a much better sense of what we are doing than we did when we first started. We need to spend time writing up what we are doing since we finish next August. We are developing emerging local knowledge-scapes. There are two degrees of reflexivity: we work with the communities to establish what has changed as a result of the work we are doing together, then as a cooperative we reflect on the work we are doing and the way we are doing it as a way of changing our own practice.

How Sulá Batsú became involved with IKME

As far as the IKME project goes, I came into this from meeting Mike Powell at a conference in Europe. He remembered me when he put the programme together and asked if I would be interested in joining. It is important for each of us in the programme to become more aware of what the others are doing – perhaps when we next meet up we could do a museum exercise with each of us exhibiting what we have been involved in. Would it be useful to develop a glossary of terms as a programme to try to explain what we mean by what we say?

When WG2 met in Brussels at the beginning of October group members were able to reflect on what they had and hadn’t achieved over the course of the last year, as well as to spend some time thinking about how they were working together. For some working group members taking the time to think about this had led them to understand what they were doing differently: they were able to notice things that they might not otherwise have noticed and to recognise patterns and relationships between aspects of work in which they were involved. Not everyone agreed, however. For some group members, particularly those from a more orthodox IT background, were less used to reflecting on what they were doing and why, and were more used to having formal planning procedures that led to a product being produced to a specific time frame. They were neither practised nor particularly comfortable with ways of working which might appear to lack more formal discipline. Having such voices in the group is also important since it obliges those of us who might argue for more reflection to reconsider our positions and to articulate more clearly why we think it is important. There is a generative tension between what might appear to be contradictory tendencies in the group, between those who want to spend time reflecting on how our thinking has changed about what it is we are involved in, and those who are concerned that we get on and produce products that demonstrate what we are talking about and are useful to people in the ‘South’.

The second occasion was when I met Kemly Camacho,  who is President of the Sula Batsu co-operative based in Cost Rica, in the British Museum cafe. She told me about the work her organisation is doing with digital story-telling as a project of WG1, which will be the subject of a separate post. One of the things that most interested me about the way her co-operative works is the premium she and her colleagues place on reflexivity. Every six months they sit together for between two and three days to reflect on their work and the way they are working together to do it. So the meetings are not just about monitoring progress, although this is important, but about their day to day working relationships and how power relationships between co-operative members enable and constrain the work. Their way of working together becomes an object of discussion as much as the projects they are undertaking. Not surprisingly, the projects they are undertaking for IKME also involve a form of community reflexivity. Sula Batsu members are working with infomediaries in three separate communities so that they can reflect on their own histories, how they have become. The hypothesis that colleagues are working with is that self-knowledge generated in ways that local communities shape and recognise, leads to them understanding themselves anew and a greater power to act according to their own rediscovered needs. We might think of Sula Batsu members performing a kind of second order reflexivity: they are reflecting on how their working relationships are affecting their ability to support community members to reflect on their working relationships.

Thirdly, in Amsterdam last week the Steering Committee considered two reports, one from the programme director and one from the programme evaluator as a way of reflecting on the programme and their own oversight of the programme. Both reports drew attention to programme achievements but also to some general trends, the patterning of ways of working which were giving the programme its particular shape and direction (both reports are available on D groups). The way the committee chair, Cees Hammelink, conducted the meeting was a significant factor in the way that discussion evolved around the reports, since he was intent on continuously opening up discussion and exploring the consequences. This is a very different way of working to what one might more usually encounter in such groups where there is sometimes a rush to reach a conclusion, or to push the discussion into some kind of dualism (‘was this intervention successful or not, are we on course or not, are we doing the right things or the wrong things?). Rather the discussion might be more accurately called dialectical, where the chair encouraged  interventions from participants as a way of continuously opening up what were talking about. Questioning and observation would lead to more questioning and observation. There was no premium placed on reaching consensus, particularly on the first day, and this sometimes meant our exploring our differences. This was not always easy and sometimes demands sitting with others’ expressed views beyond the point of comfort. One of the reasons that the process of exploring difference can be uncomfortable is that it can challenge the way we see the world, our identities: power relations do not just exist between ‘North’ and ‘South’, but arise between us as we sit in the room discussing together. Another aspect of difference was introduced by the presence of two ‘outsiders’ to the first day of the meeting, who are supportive of the programme but not part of it, nor are they formally part of the Steering Committee. They play an important role in introducing perspectives that those more actively engaged in the programme may be unable to see, and is part of the process of the programme developing its own discourse and engaging with the ‘outside world’ at the same time.

The second half day of the Steering Committee was spent more formally considering the business and planning aspects of programme work, although the tone of discursive reflection continued as we continued to explore difference.

More theoretical bit

What is it that is different about privileging reflection and reflexivity as research methods and how does it link to the idea of emergence? Starting briefly with the idea of emergence first, one definition of emergence is that the general global patterning which arises from an emergent process is not reducible to or predictable from the interactions of agents that contribute to that emergent process. The analytical sociologist Peter Hedstrom describes this as ‘the uncommon combination of common events and circumstances’. It is not that any outcome is possible, since a process is constrained by its particular history and context and by the characteristics of the interacting agents: however, outcomes are probabilistic, and the exact outturn is unpredictable. Novelty is likely to arise in ways which are unforseen in advance of emergent processes running their course.

Working with this definition of emergence produces two important differences between what might be understood as hypothesis testing in a natural science setting and a research project such as IKME which have implications for the choice of research methods. Firstly, in an emergent process there can be no expectation of linear cause and effect and of the ability fully to isolate variables in the experiment to test a hypothesis that one would strive for in a natural science setting. Secondly, in an emergent social process such as the IKME programme, there is no ability to guarantee the objectivity of the researchers, since the programme  researchers are participants in the experiment which is the object of study. Interpretations that researchers are forming as they contribute to the programme begin to shape the programme itself as  participants take up these interpretations in their activities, which the sociologist Anthon Giddens referred to as the ‘double hermeneutic’.

If objectivity is unachievable in the way it is understood in the natural sciences, and the exact outcome of the experiments are predictably unpredictable, how might one proceed in terms of research methods?

One way of understanding the value of reflection and reflexivity in a research programme such as this where we are both subjects and objects in what we seek to explore is as a process of paying attention to the emergent patterning of our interactions as we are engaged in them. Even drawing attention to what we think is happening will affect the outcome that we achieve together because the act of paying attention will both amplify and dampen aspects of our interaction. There is no claim  here that pointing to and describing our emergent inter-patterning will necessarily be either ‘true’ or complete, but the dialectical process of discussion described in the Steering Committee meeting above sets out a way of exposing our interpretations to each other as a way of leavening them, or allowing them to be sifted, tested and moved on. One might consider this a kind of hypothesis testing as a way of producing a more developed group interpretation of what is happening in the programme. Together we are, in Norbert Elias’ terms, trying to become more detached about our involvement. This greater detachment also involves exposing the developing arguments and descriptions to the sometimes chill winds of outside interpretation about whether what participants are engaged in is or isn’t useful. Bumping up against the outside world obliges programme participants to define and articulate what it is they think they are doing more clearly and in doing so they might make their arguments more robust.

One of the things that I am pointing to as the evaluator, then, is what seems to me to be an emerging theme of reflection and reflexivity as a key research method of relevance to the kinds of new ways of working which the programme was set up to explore. If working with multiple knowledges implies a better understanding of emergent social processes and the ways in which different perspectives on the world ineract, what methods are most appropriate for researching these? Does systematic reflection and reflexivity help?

This is also a hypothesis that, in writing about it, I am exposing to comment, reflection and refutation by the reader as a way of ‘testing’ it, exploring it and moving it on.

Over to you.