Difference between revisions of "Parsha"

Participation in shared understanding of climate and other policies (Parsha) 1. Project information Principal investigator (PI): Jouni Tuomisto, Department of Health Protection, National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) Project title: Participation in shared understanding of climate and other policies (Parsha) Site of research: THL: , Kuopio, Finland. Date of research: 1 Sept 2017 - 31 August 2021. Date of research plan: 28 Sept 2016 Funding: Academy of Finland: 420173 €, THL: 180075 €, total: 600248 € Academy committee: Biosciences and the environment. Collaborators: The research and case studies will be performed in close collaboration with scientific, policy, and participation experts in Kuopio (National Institute for Health and Welfare), Helsinki (City of Helsinki, Open Knowledge Finland, Future Earth Finland, Prime Minister’s Office, Oxford Research), Utrecht (National Institute for Public Health and the Environment RIVM), and New York City (The Governance Lab, NYU). See chapter 7 Collaborators for details. Context: Societal decision making related to climate change mitigation, environmental health, and other contemporary issues. Topic: Testing and developing methods, practices and tools for effective and coherent information flow between researchers, policy makers, and stakeholders. 2. Rationale Basic idea and merit of the project Parsha project will take several important environmental and health policy issues under scrutiny and study available scientific knowledge but also political values and options, and stakeholder concerns and beliefs. We will start from climate policies in Helsinki and disease burden of air pollution in Finland. We will use existing and novel open methods for information synthesis and modelling. Open participation and mutual learning is ensured by large collaboration networks of researchers, policy-makers, and non-governmental organisations. The project will develop a new and effective way of resolving disputes and sharing information about these resolutions. This may improve the way we perform science and policy.

Climate change policy actions need synthesis The city of Helsinki is strongly committed to climate policy by both reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to a changing climate. Recently, we performed a review of important strategy papers (Tuomisto et al. 2014) and found more than 600 planned climate actions. A major challenge is to make sense out of this diverse pool, select the most effective actions, evaluate their other impacts and desirability among different groups, and implement them coherently. Making a full impact assessment of all actions would be ideal but is not feasible. There is a clear need to develop practices to organise information about extensive topics with large written materials, difficult scientific questions, high political stakes, and widely differing opinions and values.

An example of a critical scientific dispute is the actual climate impact of biofuels. If biofuels are found as bad in Finland as a fresh US study demonstrates (DeCicco et al. 2016), this resolution seriously alters the preference order of several policy actions. A useful information system would identify this as a critical issue and tell, how the conclusions would change if one or another conclusion is made. The same need applies to non-scientific disputes about values as well.

Air pollution disease burden is a methodological and policy challenge Many environmental issues are health issues as well. During the recent years, several assessments have been performed about health impacts of fine particles, the major pollutant in Finland as well as globally (Hänninen & Knol 2011, Asikainen et al. 2013, Lelieveld et al. 2015, Brauer et al. 2016). However, at the same time, the whole method used to calculate premature deaths caused by air pollution has been challenged, and the discussion is still ongoing (Morfeld, Héroux ##). The discussion is very much about the detailed methods, mathematics, and interpretations of concepts, being far too complex for any policy maker to follow.

Again, there is a need for an information system that can be used to organise the knowledge and produce an understandable, policy-relevant synthesis that is consistent with the methodological discussion and conclusions. Also, the conclusions should be reflected in the actual mathematical tools assessors are using in their health impact assessments. Parsha project is based on an existing system, Opasnet web-workspace, that partly offers these functionalities but that requires several steps of development and research to fulfil this need.

Persistent disputes about climate friendliness of biofuels and methods of calculating and interpreting attributable risks show that there is a need for a) systematic and detailed discussion between disagreeing parties and b) an open, neutral repository for resolutions and reasonings of these discussions.

RDF, DAG and BBN is a novel combination for organising information Information systems have developed and are developing rapidly, offering functionalities that were just a dream ten years ago. However, these are typically developed for needs within disciplines, while here we are talking about systems and practices that should be shared by two completely different disciplines: science and policy. A premise of Parsha is that this difference is a major reason for inefficient use of science in policy, and shared information systems and practices would be a major breakthrough. Therefore, we now present a few powerful systems and discuss their potential in this interdisciplinary task.

Resource description framework (RDF) is a system developed by W3C, an organisation for standardising the Internet (REF about W3C##). RDF can describe rich spaces of information, e.g. contents of an encyclopedia, in a systematic way by defining items and relations that describe properties of the items (REF ## about RDF or Wikidata). RDF is extensively used in e.g. defining the contents of Wikipedia using the Wikidata RDF database. The database enables rich queries of the content. Such properties are needed also for describing complex policy issues. Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are an effective graphical way to describe items and their relations. They are extensively used in many disciplines, but they are especially useful in e.g. describing causal relations of knowledge crystals (Pearl 2009). If these relations are estimated as conditional subjective probabilities, the information in the system can be updated using Bayes’ rule, and the system is called a Bayesian belief network (BBN).

RDF and BBN are becoming more commonly used, but they have not been used together to describe complex policy situations in such a way that scientific issues, values and disputes would have all been described in a single, coherent system. In addition, pragma-dialectic argumentation theory gives rules for resolving disputes (van Eemeren & Grootendorst 2004). Our innovation is that the essence of these resolutions can be described using RDF and thus take argumentation as an integral part of the system. This combination of novel techniques is unique and gives promises of important breakthroughs. Whether this combination works as expected, will be studied during the project.

Although we describe causal systems and people’s reasoning in the same information system, our aim is not to build artificial intelligence that solves policy problems automatically. Rather, the objective is to build an information system where all relevant information - including political discussion - can be organised, synthesised, criticised and made readily available in useful format for policy making.

Open practices are needed in science. PUT THIS FIRST?#The society has changed, and the legitimacy of science requires openness and discussion with citizens, not just one-directional informing of scientific wonders. (Väliverronen 2016a & 2016b).

There is a lot of current activity related to open publishing of articles; open data (Open linked data##); policy relevance of scientific information (Jussila 2012, Klemola ym. 2014, Raivio 2014, Vihriälä 2016, VNK 2011); research focussed on rapid societal utility (Strategic Research Council of the Academy; Prime Minister’s Office’s research program VN-TEAS); citizen science; public participation and co-creation in policy development; and experimentation of different policies m(Tietokäyttöön##). Between and connected to all of these, there exists an ecologic niche for this project: there is an urgent need to study how information should and could flow in the society and produce a consistent, comprehensive approach that is able to capture important ideas, values, and causal understanding related to different activities in the society. It must also be able to distinguish which relevant claims can and which cannot be defended based on science, bearing in mind that there are also other than scientific worldviews in the society.

Open assessment takes two steps toward shared understanding TOO LONG##

In our previous work with open assessment, we have already shown that its information structures are effective and applicable in impact assessments and policy analyses. (Pohjola et al. 2012, Tuomisto et al. 2015, Pohjola & Tuomisto 2011) A central idea is knowledge crystal (Tuomisto 2015) a distinct web page that has a clear research question and that aims to answer it by co-creating a synthesis of scientific data. Importantly, knowledge crystals are re-usable objects and they are expected to develop in time when they are used in new impact assessments. Knowledge crystals are also effective means to communicate, as they have a plain-text summary in the beginning and go into more and more technical details, data, and analysis code for experts in the end. This approach enables an information structure, where all information relevant to a particular research question is located in one place. This is an improvement to the prevalent scientific publishing system, where information is published in static articles in a fragmented way with limited error correction functionalities (Tragedy of error##).

However, impact assessments have two major limitations, both of which will be tackled in this project. First, performing an assessment requires a lot of work to synthesise scientific information into a quantitative causal description of policy-relevant issues. Therefore, it is often not available in the time frame of rapid political decisions. Second, assessments typically focus on causal chains with established scientific knowledge, thus leaving many important aspects untouched, because solid scientific data is not available or the aspects are inherently based on values rather than facts.

The first problem can be alleviated by openly available, ready-made, reusable information objects that shorten the time to make an assessment. As mentioned earlier, we already have a structure for such objects and a web-workspace for their production. Experiences so far are promising.

Solutions to the second problem are less well developed. Ideally, it should be possible to describe any policy-relevant aspect with the same level of detail and scrutiny as a quantitative impact assessment model. However, this is not possible in practice. A hypothesis in Parsha is that it is enough to describe an aspect in some meaningful relation with other relevant aspects, as long as all aspects can be exhaustively described. What set of relations is enough and what attributes of an aspect should be described in a shared understanding, that is a major research question in this project.

Shared understanding connects science and policy. WAY TOO LONG## To understand what kind of research is needed, let’s first look at ideal shared understanding. It is a written description of all participants’ claims, values, and scientific issues that are relevant to the policy issue at hand. They are described and connected to each other with logical, causal and other relations. From this description it is possible to reproduce anyone’s viewpoint in detail to their satisfaction. It is also possible to analyse discrepancies between any two participants’ viewpoints. Importantly, the scientific viewpoint, based on data and refutation of implausible hypotheses, can also be described and used in comparing different viewpoints.

Based on an ideal description, it is possible to infer what actions each participant would support or oppose and why if they were the decision-maker. This brings arguably important benefits. First, it offers a single rich source of reliable, policy-relevant information and thus reduces the power of malevolent distribution of false claims. Second, it reduces the need for politics. In the current political system, a lot of effort is put to fighting over power, but in shared understanding participants can focus on the actual substance because their views are heard based on the merit of their ideas rather than whether they are in the position to decide.

This project is based on the assumption that such ideal shared understanding would improve decision support by facilitating decisions that are according to the values of the people and based on rational, slow thinking. The research questions arise from this premise. How can such a shared understanding be produced? What participatory practices motivate people to share their views with others? What information structures are needed to describe it to the participants’ satisfaction? What interfaces guide the users to useful information and help them contribute meaningfully? How much of the information work can be outsourced to non-experts without loss of quality?

1. 1. HUONO Exhaustiveness is a key concept. A successful online documentation of shared understanding contains all relevant aspects related to a policy issue. Then it can be used to improve signal-to-noise ratio, because then it is possible to say to a person trying to repeat old arguments: “That was discussed already, and the resolution can be found from here.” But if the description is not exhaustive, we cannot know whether a new aspect has actually been discussed, and we have to engage in the same discussion again, which is of course inefficient. It should be noted, that the current policy-making is, in this respect, very inefficient, because most lines of text written or read about a policy issue are mere repetition of a limited number of key aspects, with possibly minor variation. (REF?##)

Therefore, a major research question is this: is it possible to develop a guidance for describing exhaustive shared understanding, and can that guidance be followed in practical policy situations?

Basic scientific concepts may be unfamiliar to citizens or even university students, preventing learning of related facts. An effective way to avoid this problem is refutational text that specifically aims to identify and explicate typical misconceptions. (Södervik 2016). Shared understanding is a systematic approach to produce refutational texts about policy issues. 3. Objectives and expected results 3 A Objectives of the research Parsha project will study several policy cases relevant for environment and health, review scientific knowledge and synthesise political discussion. All this information is described as shared understanding of the cases. The bold aim is to produce such a comprehensive and well-structured description that most political and scientific aspects raised can be reproduced from there. Such description would enable understanding and learning what and why should be decided, given the valuations of a particular participant. If this aim is achieved, shared understanding may become a key method to produce and disseminate policy-relevant information. This may result in positive feedback loop of improved understanding, when citizens learn to use the method to demand clarity in policy, and experts and policy-makers learn to use it to offer clarity and rationale for decisions.

Parsha is based on i) a social innovation of hearing every viewpoint systematically without aiming at consensus; ii) an information science innovation of a structured synthesis from which viewpoints can be reproduced and discrepancies analysed; and iii) a technological innovation of an interface to facilitate participation, knowledge retrieval, learning, and policy support. Our hypothesis is that scientific knowledge prevails in this process because of its internal consistency, while vague and flawed reasoning is identified as such and turned down.

Objectives and related research questions: Substantive: To produce shared understanding and policy guidance for the city of Helsinki climate mitigation policies and strategies, accounting for health, climate and other impacts; fine particle disease burden and related policies; and other case studies. What climate actions seem effective in Helsinki? Can the guidance for Helsinki be extended or generalised to the whole of Finland? Are Finnish fine particle policies effective? Participatory: To develop practices that are tempting and rewarding to policy-makers, experts, and stakeholders so that participation in the production of shared understanding is seen useful. What factors increase or hinder participation? Are people motivated to participate and produce meaningful content? Can researchers produce a common “scientific perspective” by participating? Can the work be crowdsourced and in what conditions? Methodological: To test, implement, and further develop the method of shared understanding. Can shared understanding be described as an information system? What essential parts does it have? Are the contents of the information system clear to the readers and do they convey the original message? How can conflicting opinions be systematically described to everyone’s satisfaction? What tools are needed to combine slow modelling and rapid political discussion? Can shared understanding be produced without compromising scientific integrity? Technological: To produce web-based tools for creating and managing descriptions of shared understanding. Are people willing to participate using such an interface? What problems do the current typical interfaces have, and how can they be improved? Are the developed technologies scalable to much wider use? 3 B Effects and impact beyond academia

Shared understanding would offer methods to improve the knowledge base of policies. Methods are likely to find support from the society, as Parsha goes along several societal megatrends (openness, participation, co-creation, evidence-based policy). It is likely to alleviate confrontation, because everyone is better heard than before and political benefits of shouting louder decrease. In some cases, popular political opinions and options would not hold against systematic criticism, reducing the risk that the actual decisions turn out bad to the society.

This is actually nothing more than the scientific method applied to policy questions. There is strong evidence that the scientific method is a very powerful and effective tool to produce solid information. This is no news. However, the scientific and societal merit of the Parsha project is that it has identified important areas in the society where this method is not satisfactorily applied, and has produced innovations that can be rigorously studied in policy-relevant situations. It should be noted that the scientific method is not ideally used in the field of science either. Therefore, we also study how to produce and publish scientific information in a more criticisable and applicable way.

If successful, we can learn new things about how science and policy can be performed together in a more effective and robust way by using shared information systems and practices. The societal impacts of Parsha may extend far from the substantive topics studied in the cases. This is facilitated by maximising openness and the potential for re-use of its information content. It may even change the way we think about scientific publishing: continuous participatory improving of the description of our understanding, rather than producing distinct, static objects called articles.

3 C Publication plan Openness is a core principle in Parsha. All work is done online, and all scientific data and information is produced into standardised information objects, enabling their effective re-use. This is called passive openness (enabling but not promoting the flow of information). We anticipate also traditional research articles: one for each case study and several articles about participation, methodology and the overall progress. We always publish in open access journals. To illustrate: this very research plan was written on a public website, and we will publish it in the open access journal Research Ideas and Outcomes after it has been submitted to the Academy of Finland.

In Parsha, we will also do active openness by promoting the information produced and case studies planned or performed. We will also actively seek to learn from other information providers, as exemplified by the research visits to the GovLab and RIVM, and by inviting contributions to the web-workspace. This will be done through the large networks of the collaborators and participants, and by actively utilising workshops and social media, e.g. blogs, Facebook groups, and Twitter. 4. Research methods and material, support from research environment

Methods The most important method to test shared understanding is to apply it to several case studies, the first ones being climate policies in Helsinki, and disease burden of fine particles in Finland. Others will be decided during the project to ensure that they are scientifically important and politically relevant. This simple approach offers a strong test bench, because we can describe the information by applying the method and then testing in real situations whether participants find and understand the information as intended. We can also study if and how this information is used in actual decision-making processes, because there is political activity related to these issues.

A core of a shared understanding description is typically a quantitative model of the central issues with scientific information, implemented as BBN, Monte Carlo simulation or other causal model. These are augmented with claims, valuations, action suggestions and comments raised by participants. Online discussions on important details will be organised as needed. Emphasis is put on describing both the structure of the augmented model and its main results in a visual and understandable way. Models are produced on line in such a way that participants can run and experiment the model with different input parameters.

We will study user participation in web-workspaces by using randomised controlled trials, also called A/B testing. The content or instructions are shown differently to different groups to see if the interpretation or participatory actions differ between the groups. This brings important knowledge about feasibility of the method.

For information collection about the cases, we will use several different kinds of methods, including workshops, literature reviews, online participation, and surveys. Information is collected in several iterations so that preliminary results and conclusions are published online and comments and further contributions are asked. We will actively contact relevant policy makers, experts and stakeholder groups to ensure wide coverage of aspects. We will also approach individuals to explain and defend their views against criticism and for clarification. Similar views are merged into a few archetypes that are chosen so that they represent a large proportion of the whole population’s views.

Materials Scientific literature and policy strategies about the cases (first cases are climate policies and fine particles) will form the material to start with. There is an abundance of research and impact assessments (e.g. Hänninen and Knol 2011, Asikainen et al 2013, Lelieveld et al 2015, IPCC 2014, Tuomisto et al. 2014). Rather than attempting a comprehensive review, we will focus on issues that are the most relevant for the policy questions of the cases. These will be augmented by information obtained using methods described above. We have excellent modelling and data management tools, based on R software, MongoDB database and Opasnet web-workspace.

We will also collect information about the workload of the information work. This is important because the management of a large and complex information base may need too much administration to be useful for its purpose. This may be a major obstacle in promoting the method, and such problems should be identified and solved quickly if possible.

Research environment THL and its environmental health units in Kuopio is a highly skilled research environment. We have previously performed research and assessments on related topics (Asikainen et al, 2013; Hänninen and Knol, 2011; Tuomisto et al, 2014, Pohjola, 2014, Neittaanmäki, 2016). The technical infrastructure is up-to-date, and we have many statisticians and modellers to consult within the institute if needed. The project as a whole with all its collaborators consists of a wide variety of expertise from government to non-governmental organisations to participatory experts to researchers of environmental health and social sciences.

Critical points and risk management In theory, Parsha is simply applying established principles in new kind of information and policy support work. In practice, we will run into problems related to complexity, vagueness, power, and compliance. Risks are reduced by wide collaboration, openness (“if you fail, do it early and learn from it”), and reliance on robust open source technology and tested methods. There are several alternative techniques available, so dead-ends are unlikely. Even if the methodology as a whole fails to mature and become directly applicable during the Parsha project, it will undoubtedly teach us a lot about how information flows between science and policy and what factors hinder the flow. This is already a valuable result. From substantive point of view, there is a lot of scientific information available about climate policies, fine particles, disease burden methods, and other relevant topics. This is not a limiting factor, but rather the methodological capability to organise and synthesise it. Fortunately our team has expertise and skills to handle exactly this kind of topics.

The risk of failure can be managed by limiting the scope of work. We aim at generic methods and results with wide applicability, but the width or complexity of material may prevent progress. Then we will focus on one particular aspect or policy issue at a time, and when methods produce tangible results, step back and analyse problems seen in the generic case.

5. Ethical issues Parsha project does not study patients or collect private data. Ethical permissions are not needed. Participation is voluntary and based on informed consent. THL guidance on good research practice will be followed. 6. Implementation: schedule, budget, distribution of work Schedule for the research The project will start 1 Sept 2017 and last for four years. Method development starts immediately. The first mobility visit is expected in 2017 and the second 2018. The case studies start in 2017 but are most active in 2018; other case studies will be started in 2019 and 2020. Technical interface development is done in 2018-2019. Participatory activities, training, and dissemination will occur during the whole project. Budget The total Parsha budget will be 600248 € (420173 € from Academy + 180075 € from THL) for four years. It will mostly go to salaries of THL researchers for performing case studies and developing the method of shared understanding. Researcher Arja Asikainen will work 24 pm during the project, while Päivi Meriläinen will work 4 pm, Otto Hänninen 7 pm, and PI Jouni Tuomisto 4 pm on administration and coordination. All researchers are experienced modellers and have coordinated several research projects. Four pm is reserved for an IT person for developing the technological functionalities.

The second largest cost item is services: 28 000 € during the project and up to 9000 €/year. This is planned for organising stakeholder meetings (2-3 meetings per year) and facilitating the participation and moderating information of the case studies on websites. Part of this work is anticipated to be performed by the collaborators, some of which are especially skilled in this respect. Travel costs include 2000 €/year for frequent travels between Kuopio and Helsinki to project and case meetings, and extra budget of 6000 € for each mobility visit. Distribution of work Workpackage 1: Case studies WP Leader: Otto Hänninen Case: Climate policy in Helsinki. 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. The city of Helsinki Environment Center is a key collaborator.

Case: Fine particle disease burden. 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. These issues will be clarified by producing shared understanding on both the method (already an conference abstract: Tuomisto et al 2016) and the situation in Finland. This will be based on work and results of currently on-going Akatemia funded project BATMAN, where estimates of disease burden caused by particulate matter in Finland are updated with spatial and source specific exposure data. Furthermore, in BATMAN the effect of several emission mitigation policies are evaluated and ranked. Based on the results of BATMAN and earlier national projects Seturi and ISTE, a shared understanding on common disease burden methodology is produced in Parsha. This is reached by evaluating how the used disease burden methodology and selected boundaries of assessments affect importance of particulate matter as an environmental hazard in Finland and whether the conclusions are affected by methodological differences or not. Furthermore, current Finnish policies targeted on particulate matter are reviewed and described openly to reach shared understanding. The review process will include both literature review and discussions with politicians, ministries and local authorities. With these actions national level policies and community level decisions can be defined. RIVM as an expert institute is a key collaborator.

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: Participation and mobility WP Leader: Arja Asikainen. Open knowledge tools are being developed rapidly in many different fields. Therefore, Parsha will collaborate with top institutes and organisations in the world and in Finland. This collaboration brings expertise of methods, large networks, co-creation capacity, policy contacts and relevance. Parsha is very much about hand-on work on policy-relevant questions with scientific aspects. With the skills mentioned above, the project is able to organise the participation needed in the case studies. The collaborators also help to screen development elsewhere and evaluate potential methods. The personnel and roles of participants is described in more detail in paragraph Research team below and in the application.

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. They are also long enough to teach some of the Parsha knowledge in those institutes. This is described in more detail in Mobility plan below. Workpackage 3: Information structures WP Leader: Jouni Tuomisto. Many information structures already exist for open assessments and open policy practice (Tuomisto and Pohjola 2007, Pohjola 2013). They give instructions on how to divide information into objects with clear purpose, what attributes should be used to describe the contents, and how objects relate to each other. This is to help information use by making data management, searches and inferences somewhat automatic.

Based on our experience, those structures work well in impact assessments, which are systematic, science-based quantitative modelling exercises performed by experts and describing causal relations. However, they are not flexible enough for describing non-causal inferences, heuristics and value judgements important in people's opinions about policy issues. There is a need for more flexible information structures, and promising approaches were described in Rationale: resource description framework RDF, Bayesian belief networks BBN, and pragma-dialectic argumentation.

A coherent combination of these methods will be first defined theoretically and then tested in the cases. We first aim at a fairly simple and straightforward structure that can describe most of the information found important by participants, rather than trying to describe everything with more complex structures at the cost of usability.

Important 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 statements but using different qualities or truth values. For example, greenhouse gas emissions of biofuels is a concept that people probably can agree on, but they have differing views on which values can be called true in a defined situation. In a sense, we record subjective probabilities subjectively, not as a consensus of a group. Workpackage 4: Technical development WP Leader: Päivi Meriläinen. We already have an open web-workspace Opasnet, where assessors can perform impact assessments. However, technical development is needed to include an RDF database and other functionalities for handling e.g. non-causal reasoning and value judgements.

Another task is to enhance the user experience. It should be able to easily document own viewpoints and link them to other relevant information 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. 7. Research team and collaborative partners Participants and their special interests (with funding): THL: shared understanding method, disease burden estimates. All researchers are experts in environmental health, impact assessment, disease burden, and quantitative modelling. Jouni Tuomisto: chief researcher ##PITÄISI KIRJOITTAA MEISTÄ ESITTELYT…. Otto Hänninen: senior researcher … Arja Asikainen: researcher… Päivi Meriläinen: resarcher … N.N.: information technology expert ... Collaborators and their special interests (with letter of commitment but no direct funding from the Academy) City of Helsinki (Environment Center): climate change mitigation and adaptation policy and open data: Jari Viinanen: graduated as M.Sc in field of energy and environment from Lappeenranta University of Technology. Since 2002 he has been working as environmental inspector in City of Helsinki Environment Centre. He is a specialist of urban climate change mitigation and adaptation and has worked in climate change projects developing strategies and writing reports. Jari Viinanen has also done air quality and waste management expert work in relation to air quality programmes and street dust research. The Governance Lab (New York University, USA): Experimenting of social methods. Beth Noveck: has graduated from Harvard University with an AM, University of Innsbruck with a PhD and from Yale Law School with a JD. She directs The Governance Lab and its MacArthur Research Network on Opening Governance, which is designed to improve governance in governments and elsewhere. She served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and director of the White House Open Government Initiative (2009-2011). UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her senior advisor for Open Government, and she served on the Obama-Biden transition team. She’s also designed or collaborated on Unchat, The Do Tank, Peer To Patent, Data.gov, Challenge.gov and the Gov Lab’s Living Labs and training platform, The Academy. National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, RIVM (The Netherlands): science-based policy support. Erik Lebret, MSc, PhD is Chief Science Officer "integrated risk assessment" at RIVM. His areas of expertise are environmental epidemiology, exposure assessment, and integrated environmental health impact assessment. He has more than 30 years of expertise on supporting policy makers and stakeholders in the use of scientific knowledge. In addition he works as professor for the Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences (IRAS) at Utrecht University on Environmental Health Impact Assessment. Erik Lebret has been a principal investigator for various European research projects (EU Framework Programmes) and team leader of a consortium that carried out research into the effects of air pollution on the respiratory systems in children in six Central and Eastern European countries. Open Knowledge Finland ry: open science; participation in open society. Heidi K. Laine: leader of the Open Science Working Group, which supports open sharing of research data, code, protocols, teaching material, publications, and other resources, and citizen science. Heidi Laine obtained her master’s degree in social sciences and is currently a University of Helsinki Doctoral Candidate in the Humanities and Social and Behavioural Sciences. Laine’s research is an experiment in Open Science in the domain of qualitative social science. In addition Laine has expertise concerning research ethics and integrity in the context of Open Science. Oxford Research: expert advice in policy support: Arttu Vainio: is currently working as CEO of Oxford Research Oy to offer services in the fields of research, evaluation and consulting with the Finnish Oxford Research team and together with the Oxford Research offices in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Latvia and promoting cooperation with customers and partners as well as creating networks both in public and private sectors. He had his LSc in 1996 and is currently writing a doctoral thesis on the use of evaluation in European Regional Development Fund programmes in Finland. Arttu Vainio has long experience of planning, managing and carrying out demanding research assignments, good knowledge of research methods, long experience especially in the field of evaluation studies and he has existing transnational cooperation networks especially in Northern Europe and wide networks in Finland. Future Earth Suomi: co-creation of policy-relevant science. Tanja Suni: has a PhD in atmospheric physics from University of Helsinki, Finland. She has worked for international global change programmes and since 2014, she has participated in developing the new global change research programme Future Earth as Executive Director of the European network of national Future Earth platforms and Secretary General of the Finnish national committee for Future Earth. Her work concentrates on developing research culture to better answer the grand challenges of sustainability. Prime Minister’s Office: Kaisa Lähteenmäki-Smith: is currently working in Finnish Prime minister’s office as a specialist in science policy in Policy analysis unit. She has PhD in political science from University of Turku, Finland and has previously worked on R&D projects dealing with research and innovation, as well as regional development, in national, Nordic and European context. She has worked with European aspects of Finnish regional policy at the Finnish Ministry of the Interior, in an international research context at Nordregio (Nordic Centre for Spatial Development) in Stockholm, as a consultant at Net Effect Ltd and thereafter at Ramboll Management Consulting, specializing in policy and programme evaluation, as well as institutional evaluation. Manchester University: Colin Talbot: a professor of Government in Politics and holds the Chair of Government in the School of Social Sciences. His main area of expertise is public services and public management reform. He has completed major international comparative studies on the creation of arms-length agencies (for the UK government and ESRC); of the use of performance reporting systems (for the National Audit Office); and of budget participation and scrutiny systems (for the Scottish Parliament). Colin has advised Parliamentary Committees on performance and public spending issues for the Treasury, Public Administration and Welsh Affairs Committees. He is currently looking at the interface between academia and policymaking through a series of studies and experimental virtual "Policy Labs". 8. Research careers, fulfilment of the mobility requirement and researcher training The PI does not belong to early-career group. Instead, he has almost 25 years of expertise in environmental health, air pollution, impact assessment, and lately decision support. He has been active during the whole career and sought new emerging areas for research topics. He was a researcher in a centre of excellence in 2002-2007 and academy researcher in 2005-2010.

The Parsha researchers in THL all already have their postgraduate degrees. Although formal researcher training does not take place, the project has a strong emphasis on training of researchers as well as policy makers and stakeholders to the methods of effective information work. We do not expect that the novel methods and tools can be implemented out-of-box. Rather, it requires training, which we will give, and, more importantly, cultural change towards openness and sharing. Parsha is committed to equality, which is also promoted by the open methods used.

9. Mobility plan for the funding period Project leader or another researcher from THL will visit The Governance Lab in The New York University and RIVM (The Environment and Health Institute in the Netherlands).The visits will last approximately three months and the main purpose is to jointly apply methods of Parsha and of the collaborator. After mutual learning, these methods will be further applied in Parsha work in Finland. The GovLab has expertise in experimentation of policies and technologies in policy support, while RIVM has extensive expertise in policy support especially in environmental health issues. For further information, see Workpackage 2 and the Project partners section in the application. 10. Bibliography Asikainen A, Hänninen O, Pekkanen J (2013). Ympäristöaltisteisiin liittyvä tautitaakka Suomessa. 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