Difference between revisions of "Parsha"

Revision as of 21:01, 20 September 2016

Parsha is a research project applied from the Academy of Finland in September 2016. Its main objective is to test and implement the method of shared understanding on pressing environmental and health issues and other policy relevant problems. The method of shared undestanding is closely related to open assessment (a scientific method to evaluate impacts of policy decisions) and open policy practice (guidance to evaluate and manage a decision support process that involves an open assessment). However, the method of shared understanding (link goes to a Finnish description), is especially focussing on developing a description of issues, statements, and values presented by participants of a complex political decision situation. This goes beyond the description of scientific knowledge (which is the aim of open assessment) and incorporating that into an "official" decision making process (which is the aim of open policy practice). The method of shared understanding aims to understand and describe also aspects and values that researchers say are wrong or decision makers say are irrelevant or unfavourable. The purpose of such an exercise is to understand, discuss, and mediate societal opinions that may lead to controversies, political opposition, or even conflicts.

Abstract

Open data and practices are becoming increasingly common in the society. This trend has also brought problems: new internet tools enable also to distribute false and even malevolent information and to distort policy making. Scientific policy support practices have not been well equipped to tackle this challenge. An example is prevalent quasi-scientific climate scepticism.

Shared understanding is a situation, where participants know, what the important issues are and where there are agreements and disagreements and why. In Parsha project it is considered a prerequisite for rational, slow thinking and societal policy making. The main objective of Parsha is to test and implement methods and tools for producing shared understanding on pressing environmental and health issues and other policy-relevant problems.

Shared understanding will be produced in several policy-relevant but controversial situations, starting with climate change policies in Helsinki and disease burden disputes related to air pollution. New topics will be chosen for the latter part of the project based on future needs. The methods to be used are based on open assessment and open policy practice, which have been developed and successfully used by our team and which evaluate impacts of future policy decisions using scientific information. In Parsha, the focus will additionally be on systematically describing and analysing values and statements not necessarily based on science.

Parsha is based on i) a social innovation of hearing every viewpoint systematically without aiming at consensus; ii) an information science innovation to produce a structured synthesis from which viewpoints - including science-based - can be reproduced and discrepancies analysed; and iii) a technological innovation to produce an interface to facilitate participation, knowledge retrieval, learning, and policy support.

Parsha will extensively use participation and co-creation in its studies and actively share its results. It will use experiments to test performance of the innovations: whether they actually can collect, synthesise and describe information from participants to their satisfaction; whether the synthesis is informative and correctly interpreted by others; whether the disputes can be identified and their impact described; and whether such analyses actually help policy makers avoid emotional, fast thinking. If they do, many complex environmental and health problems may come closer to a solution.

Description of tasks

The duration of Parsha project is four years, starting from September 1, 2017. The work is divided into the following workpackages and tasks.

Workpackage 1: Participation

This workpackage develops the social innovation of hearing and documenting all viewpoints. It is very much organised based on co-creation of case studies. The work is facilitated by collaborators. --# : Can we add Future Earth Suomi, OKFFI, and others here? --Jouni (talk) 21:01, 20 September 2016 (UTC)

Case studies:

• The city of Helsinki has more than 600 action points in various climate strategies and other policy papers. For only a few of them, a systematic evaluation with cost estimates and climate impacts have been done. There is a clear need to organise the information, disputes, roles and actions into a coherent description. In other words: Shared understanding is needed. This will be produced using consultation of target groups within the Helsinki administration and also NGOs and other stakeholders who have opinions about the actions.
• There are several recent disease burden estimates of air pollution for both Finland and globally. However, there are scientific disputes about the best epidemiological methods (Morfeld REF) and scoping for assessments (Seturi vs ISTE?). These issues will be clarified by producing shared undeerstanding on both the method (already an conference abstract: Tuomisto et al 2016) and the situation in Finland --# : Should we describe the participatns in THL? --Jouni (talk) 21:01, 20 September 2016 (UTC)
• Vaccination coverage and acceptability is an issue where researchers say that the benefits of several vaccines are undisputable; yet they are disputed in the society. We will produce a shared understanding of this issue and identify the main arguments and values that contradict. It will also be a test about wether people agree to participate in a process with people who have strongly opposing views about personally very important issues. We may also learn how well viewpoints can be described based on previously written material only, without actual participation.
• New case studies will be decided later in the project, because it would be impossible to predict, which topics will have policy relevance after three years.

Workpackage 2: Information structures

Many information structures already exist for open assessments and open policy practice (Tuomisto and Pohjola 2007, Pohjola 2013). Based on our experience, those structures work well in impact assessments, which are mainly systematic, science-based modelling exercises describing causal relations. However, they are not flexible enough for describing non-causal inferences, heuristics and value judgement important in people's opinions about policy issues. There is a need for more flexible information stuctures.

We have piloted with promising results a resource description framework using triple approach. Triples have a subject, a predicate (a relation between items) and an object describing something about the subject. With a small number of different relations we have successfully described complex environmental health issues. So, we will expand the use of this approach and see how it works in the case studies and how the participants can understand own and other people's viewpoints based on triple descriptions.

In addition, we will experiment pragma-dialectical argumentation theory developed in the University of Amsterdam (van Eemeren, Grootendorst). It has been implemented in several fields ⇤# : Where, describe a few examples. --Jouni (talk) 21:01, 20 September 2016 (UTC), but not previeously in producing statements for shared understanding.

Another topic for investigation is a method to incorporate differing views into a single description. We anticipate that most of the time it will be possible to describe different views with the same stataments but using different qualitiers or truth valuess. For example, anti-vaccine activists and pediatricians agree that "vaccines are dangerous to children" is a meaningful statement and relevant in the context; the dispute comes from the fact that the former group thinks it is true while the latter group thinks it is false. Interestingly, both groups may agree on a related statement: "If vaccines are dangerous to children, they should not be used." It is useful to see that the difference is in premises, not the reasoning. Although such an example may seem trivial, we think that in many political cases similar clarifications are not made and the precise reasons for disputes are not understood. Another use of such an information structure is that it raises issues like "What do we actually mean by 'dangerous'?", thus directing further discussions into directions that improve shared understanding.

Workpackage 3: Technical development

We already have an open web-workspace Opasnet, where assessors can perform impact assessments. However, technical development is needed to include a triple database and other functionalities for non-causal reasoning and statemements and expressions of value judgements. This is necessary to operationalise the work produced in WP2.

However, it is also important to enhance the user experience. It should be able to easily document own viewpoints and link them to other relevant information already in the system. Also, search functionalities, linkages of related items, and at least some automatic or semi-automatic reasoning based on given premises and statements should be possible. It is also important to visualise an issue using a particular group's viewpoints or the differences of conclusions between two different groups.

Mobility

During the first years of Parsha, we will visit two key institutes and collaborate with them to learn more and try out new practices developed in the project. Both visits will last approximately three months each, and they are designed to bring some important insight to be used later in the project.

First, The Governance Lab in The New York University has wide experience in testing information and policy practices.

Second, RIVM (The Environment and Health Institute in the Netherlands) has extensive expertise in policy support and the science-policy interface.

See also

Some important pages related to the project:

• Drive folder for the application (DL 28.9.2016)
  • Parsha research plan
  • Data management plan DMP Tuuli tool for making data managemen plan
• Project description in Harava (password-protected)
• Relevant methods in Opasnet:
  • Shared understanding
  • Open policy practice
  • Open assessment
  • Method of shared understanding (in Finnish)
• Academy instructions:
  • Generic guidance for applications Call for funding
  • Consortium applications
  • Guidance for reviewers