Meggie Macdonald

On Monday of this week I had the opportunity to attend a seminar sponsored by the Knowledge Mobilization chapter at York University where John Biles, Director, Partnerships and Knowledge Transfer, Metropolis Project spoke about the concepts and efficiency of “knowledge transfer”. This sounded a bit like politically correcting terminology to the point where it had no functional meaning any more, but I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong.

Annika (and sadly I did not write down her last name), who works at Sick Kids and at the CERIS project (part of Metropolis) in Toronto, introduced the morning seminar with a basic definition of knowledge transfer as “the exchange, synthesis, and application of knowledge” and how this requires a complex system of interactions to succeed. If we want to inform policy and practice, we must be able to exhange information effectively. If we retain only 20% of what we hear and 30% of what we see, how do we do research? We do, at least, retain 90% of what we see, hear, talk about, AND do.

John Biles introduced himself and his purpose by identifying with the rapid growth of immigration in the Ottawa area and his feeling that local groups should be interacting with larger affiliations such as the United Way. The Metropolis Project, currently in its second term of 5-year funding, is a huge policy research project of over 5500 participants in more than 20 countries. The major element of Monday’s discussion was to point out that policy should not be focused on the privilege of position over what a person has to say, and thus information must be made more accessible to a larger audience. In this way, the objective to produce material that people across a wide spectrum can actually use can be achieved. Mr. Biles did mention, however, that there is no way to evaluate an effective dissemination process and this is the continued struggle of a “social science initiative”. There are more ways to ‘translate’ information to this wide spectrum and the Metropolis Project is focused on continually working out which methods or combinations of methods are the most utilitarian; therefore, the Project is heavily involved in the field of education. Metropolis has annual national and international conferences, consultations and round-tables, media exposure, and seminars to develop relationships that cross sectoral lines and thus facilitate the development of informed policy.

Barry, (and I again I neglected to write down his last name), who is one of the leading members of Metropolis’ website management team, believes that the main focus of Monday’s discussion should be on knowing your audience. The website, www.metropolis.net, emphasizes the need to identify clear responsibilities, roles, and delivery system, to articulate who they are and what they do, and to be aware of exactly what the website provides that personal interaction in other areas of the Project do not. Barry’s talk on a particularly dynamic but complex exemplar of the Project’s greater interest in audiences and knowledge transfer was incredibly helpful in identifying the nature of the abstract terms and policy discussed earlier so that the current audience could understand how these thought processes within the Project can work efficiently and effectively, as well as where they did not. He also mentioned one or two ideas that his research team is developing for the website, showing how this is always a continuous process.

Annika spoke again on how research is interpreted, even to the point where she re-evaluated her audience’s assumptions about research itself. She also provided the framework around which the Metropolis Project came into existence. Comprised of individuals from NGOs for settlement – the United Way, OCASI (The Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants), and the Social Planning Council of Toronto – and funded by three universities (York, the University of Toronto, and Ryerson), Metropolis’ research teams have incorporated all these different perspectives along with government on all three levels to produce a more functional knowledge transfer process. Metropolis’ community-based researchers are often immigrants who are able to provide the perspective of one of the major target audiences for this information. They have identified the critical nature of timeliness and the value of face-to-face interaction to facilitate the discussion vital to the Project’s process.

Finally, John Shields discussed the value of knowledge mobilization today. Initially, the access to this kind of information outside scholarly communities was limited and the need to expand potential audiences was clear. Calls for precisely this were coming from the governmental and civil communities, especially after cuts in the 1980s and 1990s led to “diminished policy capacity” within government itself. These major cuts were to the federal, provincial, and municipal governments’ ability to do in-house research, so another venue had to be established in place of that loss. Within the policy community, three elements were identified: the policy decision-makers such as leading politicians, the scholars and researchers who created the knowledge and information on policy, and knowledge brokers. This last element, acting as a bridge, is able to distill information from researchers for decision-makers, and this is what Metropolis was designed to do.

I unfortunately had to leave the seminar before the question period began to get to a graduate class, but I was very impressed with the speakers and their ability to convince an eternal terminology skeptic such as myself that these words were not meaningless but rather functional instead of being definable. As I told Mr. Michael Johnny in an email I sent to apologize for my abrupt departure, these ideas of the need for universal (and not basic) information will figure into my own research. I now have part of the puzzle that I wish to solve in my own professional career to bring the subject matter that I love to a wider audience without ‘dumbing it down’ for people who do not have the same education history as I do. I had been taught that this was impossible. Now I am not so sure.

For further information, please visit the Metropolis Project’s website www.metropolis.net which should have any links to other projects on this kind of policy dissemination and knowledge mobilization you may be interested in.