 Good morning. My name is Stefan Verhulst. I'm the co-founder and chief of research of the GovLab, which is an action Thanks Eric, which is an action research center at NYU, New York University And I'm delighted to speak to the hardcore of the research community I mean they always asked me when do you want to speak and I said well I want to speak to the ones that really care and then they scheduled me at 9 o'clock in the morning So finally I actually speak to those who really care and show up at 9 o'clock in Barcelona And so as I was saying GovLab is an action research center and the key focus of GovLab is to study and provide evidence on How to innovate governance in order to improve people's lives and one of the reasons why we created GovLab Was to move away from what we called fate-based innovations Innovations which are quite often it's good to do it sounds anyway It has open in it so it must be good or it has civic tech in it So me it can't be can't go wrong to more evidence-based kind of interventions. And so in order to Be more evidence-based you obviously have to a gather evidence And that's the research agenda that we have and we will talk about that also during the plenary Which is the research agenda that we have with the MacArthur research network But also you have to also take stock of the evidence that is already there And if you take stock of the evidence that is already there then basically you are confronted with some challenges How do I do this? because current research on Governance open governance and civic tech is quite fragmented to a large extent You manage to bring all the people together here But if you really want to get a notion of what is available With regard to the key findings and what is available with regard to the research then it's kind of hard to find And it's not only dispersed and fragmented It's also quite often hard to access because it's quite often placed behind paywalls everyone has the experience of going to those kinds of portals and Trying to find something and then ultimately being Urged to actually type in your password. We are lucky. We are at NYU or university Where we have some of that access but most in the field and especially those who quite often attend tic-tac who are really Action researchers have a challenge to actually even access those kinds of portals now There are of course solutions and many in the room have found ways to bypass Let alone pirate some of the the research papers that are out there And many of you are of course using Google Scholar, which is a great service in order to just find the Information that there is you have social science research network, which is also a great service in order to collide Social science research and make it open you have academia You have research gate and so on at the same time those Solutions that currently exist in order to provide access to evidence and also be able to have an insight about What is the evidence already available are still not enough and so those platforms are not targeted to the open Gulf Civic tech space and they also don't curate and contextualize their content. And so in order to solve that challenge We partnered with my society and also with the the world bank and started a beta alpha it's just up Called the open governance research exchange and Andrew who is really behind the development will explain what it is And we hope that everyone can join because this is a co-created kind of platform And only will succeed Through co-creation and so that's the reason why we're so delighted to talk to this hardcore Researchers this morning, but Andrew why don't you? Thanks fun Hi, my name is Andrew young and I'm just going to run through a little bit of the functionalities and features of the open governance research exchange We like to call it ogrex, but Most people are going with ogre whether we like it or not So as Stefan said, you know the the goal here is really to bring together The research and findings from the space and make it more accessible So the the site features content that ranges from journal articles and Working papers to books and dissertations So whenever you come to the site, there's the simple kind of keyword search as well as the ability to browse by authors Categories categories meaning innovation areas open data public sector innovation labs, etc Organizations and then of course the ability to submit new research, which I'll get to more in a moment um Our high-level navigation system here is based on uh, some of the main kind of innovation areas that seem to fit in this space I think um, one of the things that I took away yesterday was a lot of discussion around how You know the open gov civic tech space kind of encompasses so many different types of approaches tools technologies So this is our attempt to kind of provide some kind of roadmap to some of the research there So we have things like behavioral science and nudges citizen engagement open data As well as kind of a link to everything. So this is not Exhaustive in terms of what we have here you can find information on participatory budgeting to freedom of information law, etc, etc So if you were to click on the citizen engagement category there You'd come to this landing page Right at the top as stefan kind of alluded to we have this slider Which allows you to choose whether you want to look at all of the articles including those that might be behind paywalls Or specifically only access the ones that are open access um, you know, we see that as kind of a dual Benefit there because we as gov lab do want to advocate for more open access And also for those who don't have institutional access to these types of databases that stefan was mentioning before Make it kind of user friendly for them And then below that of course is a search and then we have the more detailed kind of filter and taxonomy system That allows you to browse by or filter by I should say organizations Objectives meeting, you know, is this an open data paper or a citizen engagement paper? I should say That's about increasing the effectiveness of governance. Is it about increasing the legitimacy through transparency and accountability? We have the ability to filter by methodology. So is it based on case studies rcts Sector from criminal justice to health and education Region publication type, which is wide ranging as I mentioned and also tools So if you're looking specifically for the paper on fix my street You can access it that way. So The site we tried to make it as user friendly as possible in terms of being able to do a simple keyword search But you can also go in and say, you know, I want I'm looking for a dissertation on citizen engagements used to improve The effectiveness of governing institutions in spain I'm not sure that we have one of those, but you could at least do that filter Um, so this is a kind of landing page that we have for an organization one of the founding partners The world bank digital engagement evaluation team Where you get a little information on the organization as well as the list of all of their publications there It's a similar kind of system for authors. So every author that's found on the site, you click on their name You would come to something like this And then so this is what the papers look like as you can see we have The kind of tags based on the taxonomy that I was just mentioning as well as the abstract Which also feeds into the keyword search and the ability to download the paper The papers are not housed on the site Primarily it's mostly just pointing you in the direction of where they exist whether they're on ssrn Or on one of these databases What the paywalls You know, this is um, I think probably the most important piece in my view As stefan kind of alluded to You know, we really At it at our highest aspiration We want this to become a common resource for the field and we absolutely need the help of the field to achieve that So on every page, uh, we have lots and lots of pointers to the ability to submit research We have a pretty simple form here for people to share their work whether it's Peer reviewed published journal articles or an unpublished working paper We're very interested in getting submissions from the field and this is kind of the the key piece of this in my view As to fun alluded to we have the three founding partners here But we also have some space down there for for more organizations As well as the the kind of ability to submit articles We're very interested in kind of partnerships around this. We want this to be a collaborative effort So, you know, we have a few kind of a A few partners at launch including the center for innovation at lyden university As well as events such as tic-tac, uh, where we can create kind of dedicated pages with some more information and some more research about From these events or from these organizations, but um, we're very interested in partnering with others in the field to Kind of amplify their research and and highlight it on the site and work with them to develop this in the way That's as useful as possible so, uh Check it out. It's at ogrx.org. Uh, we'd love it if you would contribute your research Become a partner share your feedback offline will be around there's also a feedback form on the site Like I said, you know, we really don't want to develop this in isolation in brooklyn We we want your input and we want to make this as useful as possible to um the people like you Thank you