"Hitting “publish” on this, my first blog post on Knowledge4Policy (K4P), is a special moment for me. I’ve helped create a few online communities for the European Commission (I launched my first in February 2002, so I just missed that particular anniversary), but K4P may be the most important."

advice on how to bring science to the attention of policymakers... dedicated to researchers and research organisations aiming to achieve policy impact... advice on new skills and practices for individual researchers, but also ... institutional change ... puts co-creation at the centre of Science for Policy 2.0, a more integrated model of knowledg…

scientific caution, rather than a strategy of “herd immunity”, drove the UK’s slow response...Sage agreeing “to publish a chronological set ... documents which have informed the questions it has considered and its advice to date... to demonstrate the uncertainties scientists have faced, how understanding of Covid-19 has developed over time, and th…

COVID-19 pandemic is shining a light on the roles that evidence and expertise can play in policy ... Epidemiological data ... reviews of evidence ... assessments of social ... impacts, and more... all competing for policy attention ... can lead to competing narratives... a sense of confusion...policy is necessarily political and evidence does not…

When the history is written of how America handled the global era’s first real pandemic ... Trump’s claim to global leadership leaps out. History will mark Covid-19 as the first time that ceased to be true. US airlifts have been missing in action. America cannot even supply itself...a president who ignored increasingly urgent intelligence warnings…

The editor-in-chief of The Lancet... I do believe lives could have been saved had we acted earlier"... demanded transparency on the opaque epidemiological models ... included ... “herd immunity”... The idea you can strip out politics from medicine or health is historically ignorant. The medical establishment should be much more politicised...…

a conservative leader in Australia and a progressive prime minister in New Zealand are ... converging toward an extraordinary goal: completely eliminating the virus from their island nations... succeeding with throwback democracy... partisanship recedes, experts lead, and quiet coordination matters more than firing up the base...the public initial…

the history and limitations of linear approaches to evidence use in the first of three articles on what we know about building effective relationships between government and research...Evidence and Policy in 2010... argued there are three generations of thinking about how best to foster engagement... The first... is a linear perspective... focus o…

In 2018, I wrote ... that America was not ready for the pandemic that would eventually come... a new cohort who are born into a society profoundly altered by COVID-19... call them Generation C... shaped by the choices made in the coming weeks...More transmissible and fatal than seasonal influenza... stealthier... nations must ... identify infected…

Britain’s leading epidemiologists ... extremely tense ... private — discussions among themselves, with the UK’s chief scientific advisor Patrick Vallance, and Boris Johnson’s government...no consensus... While the scientific debate was raging... Johnson’s government ... criticised other countries ... taken more dramatic steps, claiming Britain wa…

Our scientists are publishing sophisticated data visualisations for policymakers to use. But are policymakers using them? ... I interview Annie White and Nil Tuzcu of Harvard’s Growth Lab about their use of data visualisations for policymaking... summarise the resulting guidance we’re giving Knowledge4Policy publishers.

does researchers’ presence on Twitter influence citations to their papers?... although the relationship between tweets and citations is poor, actively participating on Twitter is a powerful way of promoting and disseminating academic outputs... an author needs three times more followers to gain only one mention more... to be or not to be on Twitte…

Informing Knowledge4Policy with an Understanding of our Political Nature - exploring on Medium what “Understanding our Political Nature”, a recent EU study into knowledge, reason and policymaking, has to say about how the Knowledge4Policy platform could (should?) evolve.

More Americans have confidence in scientists, but there are political divides over the role of scientific experts in policy issues... six-in-ten Americans say scientists should play an active role in policy debates about scientific issues... but Americans are divided along party lines in terms of how they view the value and objectivity of scientis…

our team of researchers and policy analysts work together to analyze new data and create a platform for local stakeholders to make more informed decisions.... We arm local policy-makers with customized and data-driven insights so they can craft tailored, hyperlocal solutions.

we’ve conflated data with truth. And this has dangerous implications for our ability to understand, explain, and improve the things we care about... data is not a perfect representation of reality: It’s a fundamentally human construct... subject to biases, limitations, and other imperfections... Data doesn’t say anything. Humans say things.... Dat…

We’re about to start testing new online designs to make scientific evidence more accessible to policymakers. Volunteers needed! - recruiting wireframe testers via K4P

Sweden plans to cut its emissions to net zero. A new digital visualization shows exactly what it’s doing to reach that goal—and is designed to help policymakers move faster to fill in gaps in the current plan and make sure it actually succeeds. It’s also fully open to the public, so anyone can hold the government accountable... A typical governmen…

Systematic mapping assesses the nature of an evidence base, answering how much evidence exists on a particular topic... an interactive database of studies and their meta-data, along with visualisations of this database... an R-based tool called EviAtlas, an Open Access ... Open Source ... tool for producing interactive, attractive tables and figur…

“It’s not that pretty” we hear every other day. Possibly. But what’s important: building something beautiful, or something usable?- published on the K4P Publication on Medium

scholars’ assumptions about the value of academic research... has left us ill-equipped to navigate the stormy waters of evidence informed policy and practice. He proposes that instead we extract key insights from policy theories and use them to inform discussions about how to promote evidence use.

the psychology of warnings - why some warnings get heard, why many are ignored and the pitfalls of being a prophet.... a vicious cycle ... As the planet warms, the permafrost thaws... dead animals and plants and fungi start to decompose. More decomposition means more carbon released ... means warmer temperatures... even more melting of the permafr…

Celebrating a small milestone for the K4P project on Medium.

Latest on the K4P Medium Publication

May, 2018: the EU Commission’s cross-EC Knowledge4Policy platform for evidence-based policymaking goes live in Beta mode.

How should policies be made? Ideally by policy makers making decisions after weighing the facts and reconciling the different values that exist in plural democratic societies.Reality often looks different! Operating at both sides of the science-policy interface is made challenging due to the over-supply of knowledge on one side and the complexity …