What do policymakers want from researchers? Blogs, elevator pitches and good old fashioned press mentions. by Duncan Green.
From the post:
Interesting survey of US policymakers in December’s International Studies Quarterly journal. I’m not linking to it because it’s gated, thereby excluding more or less everyone outside a traditional academic institution (open data anyone?) but here’s a draft of What Do Policymakers Want From Us?, by Paul Avey and Michael Desch. The results are as relevant to NGO advocacy people trying to influence governments as they are to scholars. Maybe more so. I’ve added my own running translation.
Two tidbits to get you interested in the report:
First, unclassified newspaper articles were as important to policymakers as the classified information generated inside the government.
[role of scholars] The main contribution of scholars, in their view, was research. Second, and again somewhat surprisingly, they expressed a preference for scholars to produce “arguments” (what we would call theories) over the generation of specific “evidence” (what we think of as facts). In other words, despite their jaundiced view of cutting-edge tools and rarefied theory, the thing policymakers most want from scholars are frameworks for making sense of the world they have to operate in.’
While the article focuses on international relations, I suspect the same attitudes hold true for other areas as well.
The impact of newspaper articles suggests that marketing semantic technologies at geek conferences isn’t the road to broad success.
As for making sense of the world, topic maps support frameworks with that result but not without effort.
Perhaps a topic map-based end product that is such a framework would be a better product?
I first saw this in a tweet by Coffeehouse.