Overview: Knowledge4Policy

The EU Commission's Knowledge4Policy platform ("K4P") is recognised as one of the most powerful, innovative knowledge management and synthesis platforms on the EC's EUROPA site.

I was first asked to help the Joint Research Centre (or JRC, the Commission's in-house scientific department) with this project in 2017, when all they knew was that they needed to build an evidence-informed policymaking platform: a website designed to bring scientists and policymakers closer together to ensure European policy was informed by science.

There are very few audiences more different than scientists and policymakers, so I was doubtful. Fear not, they assured me, "a community site will bring these two worlds together".

Based on evidence

I was not assured. As the pioneer of EC-convened communities of practice, I was the obvious choice, so they were a little taken aback when I doubted that community features should be their first priority. To their immense credit they agreed to bring in some specialists to carry out detailed audience research into what both scientists and policymakers would want from such a platform.

The audience research - an online survey, 12 ethnographic interviews and three focus groups - was undertaken while we were building the alpha version, which went live in May 2018 with 6 publishing groups. As far as we know this research was unique (they asked their international partners several times), and has underpinned the platform's development ever since. It is available in full via the 3rd in a series of interpretative blog posts.

Innovative architecture

The JRC has more websites than the rest of the EC put together, so we knew from the outset that K4P's architecture would have to scale from 6 to 166 publishing teams. Three innovations form the framework upon which everything since has been built:

Powerful knowledge management

We needed to find a way to simultaneously categorise all scientific knowledge according to its relevance to EU policy and give our scientists the highly granular, domain-specific taxonomies they craved while avoiding an unusably huge taxonomy.

Knowledge4Policy: Structure & Future, April 2022

The solution was a two-layer taxonomic architecture, combined with separating the knowledge from the groups that created it. This was soon recognised as a model for knowledge management on EUROPA, and adopted for the EC's internal Sharepoint-based knowledge management.

Concise, credible knowledge syntheses

Policymakers are not going to use our clever taxonomic architecture to filter 2000 pieces of knowledge down to 15 scientific papers to download and read.

Knowledge4Policy: Structure & Future, April 2022

Instead, they need a set of specific "policylayer" interfaces, sitting atop our powerful knowledgebase, presenting policy-friendly syntheses of the science. Like the page you're reading now, these interfaces are zettleksten overviews: a searchable, filterable collection of knowledge, plus a synthesis of that collection.

Integrated communities & collaboration

The audience research showed that many scientists but fewer policymakers would use community features, so they took a backseat until the above features were in place. When we did launch the first knowledge community, our priority was to avoid the "empty forum syndrome" so common to public sector communities.

Knowledge4Policy: Structure & Future, April 2022

Instead, we integrated the community members and their conversations right inside the knowledgebase. This avoids creating people silos - even if two Members joined different publishing groups, they would meet in discussions of the knowledge, which exists separately from the groups. Adding collaboration features to the basic community feature set is now a major focus.

Mutually reinforcing

Although the above sounds like two separate websites welded together at the hip, we've managed to integrate these three pillars so they support each other:

• scientists see their knowledge being reflected in the policylayer, giving them confidence that joining the community to contribute their science is worthwhile
• policymakers see the scientists in the community and the science behind each synthesis, reinforcing their confidence in it.

Scaling up

More publishing teams joined K4P steadily until 2024, when the JRC recognised the strategic opportunity the platform offered.

While it was initially designed for "Knowledge Services" (internal teams combining not only knowledge creation but also curation and synthesis), it is now being progressively opened up to more publishers of greater diversity. New features have been developed to support them, along with a revamped training system and a highly structured site migration programme.

In parallel, the JRC invested in the central team, hiring (for the first time) specialised editorial support and design services, and adding management layers.

The process of migrating new publishers continue, while behind the scenes we are connecting the K4P knowledgebase to the internal GPT@JRC platform, planning AI services for editors and users, and adding collaborative tools to the knowledge communities.

Read more

Check out the Building knowledge for policy Featured Topic maintained by the Evidence-informed policymaking knowledge service, plus the various resources tagged #k4p below, where the stuff I Like is relevant to the project but not associated with it, and the Stuff I Think and Do is content I've written myself to provide more detail.