Our Goals:
Capture community intelligence – the everyday smarts practitioners use to develop and implement services and policy
Connect stakeholders – facilitate information gathering, collaboration and communication
Bridge research and practice – help build scholarly practice and practical scholarship
Transform – information and insight into actionable knowledge.
We started with a set of questions which continue to drive our work:
Knowledge Capture
- How can program investments be more effectively leveraged over time, distance, and activities (policy, program, advocacy; grant making, monitoring, reporting, evaluation)?
- How can nonprofit and public organizations benefit more directly from their knowlege and experience?
- How can organizations and professionals know more, more quickly, about initiatives related to their own.
Knowledge Transfer and Sharing
- How can we get “real” information in “real time” for “real” people, not just in journals that report information much after the fact, or conferences with limited audiences?
- How do we get more information to program providers, not just to researchers?
- How can we get information from providers?
Knowledge Growth and Adaptation
- How do we engage program sites in robust communication that helps them with program development, implementation, and problem solving?
- How do communities grow and adapt programs as a result of new knowledge?
- How can program adaptation create knowledge?
Research and Analysis
- Could we, with enough volume of structured and tacit data, use new statistical methods, to begin to see patterns across sites not visible to the “naked eye” or traditional research methods?
- Can we extract information that reveals something about what contributes to, or constitutes, “quality”, “promising”, “exemplary” or “evidenced based” practices?
- How can community organizations be more active participants in, and beneficiaries of, research?
- What new forms of meta-data can be created by enabling data to “talk” to each other?
