Evidence Hub

Description

Evidence Hub: A collective intelligence platform for mapping a community and what it knows

screenshot of evidence-hub

The Evidence Hub concept reflected our need for better ways to pool, map, and harness what a community knows. The Evidence Hub was a collaborative knowledge-building (specifically evidence-building) web platform. It was designed at KMi by the team that developed the concept of “Contested Collective Intelligence” [1,2], where it was important to understand different perspectives and support quality debates. The first Evidence Hub was developed for the Open Learning Network project [3] and was further refined in the Communities of Practice for Health Visiting project [4].

An Evidence Hub provided novel visual analytics designed to give insight into, and provoke reflection on, users’ knowledge-building activity. It was designed for use by practitioner communities/networks engaged in informal learning, and by students in more formal educational contexts. 

The Evidence Hub was designed to answer questions such as: 

• Who in my region is working on this problem? 

 • Are there any partnerships between projects in these two areas, on this theme? 

 • What are the key challenges we’re facing? 

 • Who has potential solutions to these, and what’s the evidence that they work? 

 • What evidence-based claims can we make with confidence? 

 • What are the most controversial issues? 

The Evidence Hub concept took off, with multiple Evidence Hubs having been created and run. For more details, please see the Case Studies section.

Videos

An Introduction to the Evidence Hub for Open Education 

An Introduction to the Educational Futures Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub for Children and Young People – How to add Content

Evidence Hub for Children and Young People – How to use the bookmarklet

Case Studies 

Netlab Evidence Hub

Image of Netlab Evidence Hub 

The Metropolitan City of Milan worked to develop the Urban Metropolitan Agenda for Sustainable Development, which aimed to indicate specific strategies and actions that could contribute to the objectives set by the National Strategy for Sustainable Development and outlined by the UN 2030 Agenda.

The activities of the NetLAB consisted in the activation of a reference community, a trans-scalar network of stakeholders who were able to contribute substantially to defining the Agenda and to play an active role in promoting, supporting, and implementing relevant initiatives in the context of the Metropolitan City of Milan. 

HV Community Of Practice Evidence Hub

Image of HV Community Of Practice Evidence Hub

The Health Visitors Community of Practice Evidence hub allowed health visitors to raise issues, collectively suggest best practice points backed up by evidence and published resources about what works in practice in improving the health of children and families.  

Discussions and posts were organised around the six Early Years High Impact Areas that have been developed to support the Transition of commissioning to Local Authorities and to help inform decisions around the commissioning of the health visiting service and integrated children’s early years services. 

Evidence Hub for Open Education

Image of Evidence Hub for Open Education

The Open Education Evidence Hub aimed to provide an environment to systematically interrogate the Open Education movement on what are the people, projects, organizations, challenges, solutions, and claims that scaffold the movement.  

Evidence Hub for Energy Awareness

Image of Evidence Hub for Energy Awareness

The Evidence Hub for Energy Awareness was an online space for people in The Knowledge Media Institute (KMi), at the Open University, to share ideas about how they have spent energy and how they can change their behaviour to save it. 

Evidence Hub for Research by Children & Young People

Image of Evidence Hub for Research by Children & Young People 

The Evidence Hub for Research By Children & Young People aimed to provide an environment to systematically interrogate scholars and practitioner who work on Research by Children & Young People on what are the people, projects, organizations, challenges, solutions and claims that scaffold the future of research and practices on Children and Young People to Undertake their Own Research. 

Educational Futures Evidence Hub

Image of Educational Futures Evidence Hub 

The Educational Futures Evidence Hub aimed to provide an environment to systematically interrogate the Educational Futures movement on what are the people, projects, organizations, challenges, solutions, and claims that scaffold the future of Education.

Evidence Hub for Systems Learning and Leadership 

Image of Evidence Hub for Systems Learning and Leadership

The Evidence Hub for Systems Learning and Leadership was designed for global leaders of learning to pool issues and ideas, debate different kinds of evidence, and map people, projects, and organizations. 

Work and Learning Evidence Hub

Image of Work and Learning Evidence Hub

Work and Learning is a complex and often contested area. The Work and Learning Evidence Hub was designed to help users explore, map and contribute to those debates, gaining a richer understanding of working and learning. 

NeSTI Evidence Hub 

Image of NeSTI Evidence Hub

The Evidence Hub for Social and Territorial Innovation aimed to provide an environment to systematically collect practical information from daily work on innovative actions and Smart Specialisation policy design and implementation. It focused on what are the people, projects, organizations, challenges, solutions and claims that scaffold the emergent approaches to research and innovation policy making in Europe. 

This Evidence Hub was managed by NeSTI, “Network of Regions and Cities for Social and Territorial Innovation”, an NGO that is open to the free participation of European individuals and organizations. NeSTI came as the follow-up of a successful TC CEE project, CentraLab (www.centralivinglab.eu). 

Solar Community Evidence Hub 

Image of Solar Community Evidence Hub

The SoLAR Community Evidence Hub was designed for the Learning Analytics community to pool issues and ideas, debate different kinds of evidence, and map people, projects, and organizations. 

For more about Solar see the Solar Society for Learning Analytics Research (https://www.solaresearch.org/). 

FP7 Big Project Evidence Hub

Image of FP7 Big Project Evidence Hub

The BIG Evidence Hub was an online venue for the BIG Project community to pool challenges, issues, requirements, technologies and concepts around Big Data. It was a place to contribute and debate the evidence-based concepts as they moved towards creating a European Roadmap for Big Data. 

Onderwijskennis Evidence Hub

Image of Onderwijskennis Evidence Hub

This was an Evidence Hub created for Educational knowledge in Holland and was designed in collaboration with Open Universities. But in the end the site never went live.  

Evidence Hub for Online Medical Education

Image of Evidence Hub for Online Medical Education

This was intended to be an Evidence Hub for Online Medical Education. But in the end, it never went live.

Slow Dialogue Evidence Hub

Image of Slow Dialogue Evidence Hub

The Slow dialogue Evidence Hub was created for Schumacher College, for their students to debate a variety of subjects.

Evidence Hub for Testing

Image of Evidence Hub for Testing

This Evidence Hub was used for people to Learn about the platform. It provided a safe play space where people could test out a hub in action and explore the features that an Evidence Hub could offer. 

Team

Professor Anna De Liddo 

Professor Simon Buckingham-Shum 

Michelle Bachler – Software Development 

Samantha Colclough – Software Development 

Harriet Cornish – Graphics 

Source Code

For the source code for the Evidence Hub website application, please visit our Git Hub: https://github.com/idea-kmi/EvidenceHub Note: the software is released under LGPL license.

Publications 

[1]De Liddo, Anna; Sándor, Ágnes and Buckingham Shum, Simon (2012). Contested Collective Intelligence: rationale, technologies, and a human-machine annotation study. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 21(4-5) pp. 417–448. http://oro.open.ac.uk/31052 

[2]De Liddo, Anna and Buckingham Shum, Simon (2013). The Evidence Hub: harnessing the collective intelligence of communities to build evidence-based knowledge. In: Large Scale Ideation and Deliberation Workshop, 29 June – 02 July 2013, Munich, Germany. http://oro.open.ac.uk/38002 

[3]De Liddo, Anna; Buckingham Shum, Simon; McAndrew, Patrick and Farrow, Robert (2012). The open education evidence hub: a collective intelligence tool for evidence based policy. In: Cambridge 2012: Joint OER12 and OpenCourseWare Consortium Global 2012 Conference, 16 – 18 April 2012, Cambridge, UK. http://oro.open.ac.uk/33253 

[4]Ikioda, F. , Kendall, S. , Brooks, F. , De Liddo, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2013) Factors That Influence Healthcare Professionals’ Online Interaction in a Virtual Community of Practice. Social Networking, 2, 174-184. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/sn.2013.24017 


Piccolo, L., Alani, H., De Liddo, A. and Baranauskas, C. (2014) Motivating online engagement and debates on energy consumption, ACM Web Science 2014, Bloomington, US, pp. 109-118, ACM

Buckingham Shum, S., De Liddo, A. and Klein, M. (2014) DCLA Meet CIDA: Collective Intelligence Deliberation Analytics, Workshop: 2nd Int. Workshop on Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics at 4th Int. Conf. on Learning Analytics & Knowledge., Indianapolis, USA