 Thanks Megan and thanks everyone for the opportunity to share this work with you. I felt that I should begin by talking about why I'm here because I do feel very much like a fish out of water. So Derek Hoy made an approach to me in January and talked about vocabularies being an excellent platform to do silo research and that he wondered whether or he thought he could see how the work that I'm doing could help design and implement projects that use a wide variety of specialist teams by standardising language and in February Rowan invited me to give a seminar saying the following the semantic and practical approaches to making the vocabulary etc you can read that for yourselves and if I knew what any of that meant I feel much more comfortable about being here but I don't so so bear with me. So I thought so I thought I'd start with what it is that we're talking about and it's a website that I run which is a blog and a repository. It aims to share resources and build a community. It started in November 2015 and it's had actually more than 470 contributions. A slew of authors from not as many countries as I'd like. It's read almost everywhere and every contribution gets about 800 or so views and it's indexed on 14 main topics or categories as WordPress calls them so it's a WordPress website and tags and 11 resource types which are also categories but there are no tags related to those and to illustrate what those topics are I'm just going to give you this and then I'm going to go back and talk about what it's all about but figuring out the order to present things in was also a bit challenging so anyway there are 14 main topics which you can read here so every contribution that people make is categorised on one of these one or more of these main topics and there are several hundred tags and this gives you just a flavour of what those tags look like and then there are also the resource types so is what people are sending in a method or a process or a theory etc so that's the vocabulary in kind of brief that we're talking about every blog post or contribution is then categorised as follows so the category it's category so is then indexed as follows so the categories are here so this one's indexed under one main topic diversity and two resource types frameworks and theories and then there are a bunch of tags here and the authors there and this is actually the blog post that Derek Hoy saw that caught his attention and what that's worth alright so having given you what the where the vocabulary is and what it's attached to let me give you the story behind it so starting this work started in around 2000 so integration and implementation sciences is a discipline that I've argued we need that aims to improve the academic the ability of academics to tackle complex problems complex societal environmental problems and I often use this sculpture by Tim Spellman on a new campus called Cooler's Ripple as an example so if we think of this as representing reductionist theory in methods and complexity based theory in methods in an ideal world we'd be good at both of those and I argue that currently we're really good at reductionist theory in methods and we're not terribly good at complexity based theory in methods and what I'm trying to do is to think about how do we get better at helping people deal with complex societal and environmental problems how do we make that more feasible so the first place I looked was who's doing that kind of work now and there are a bunch of areas that have defined this as their business so the interdisciplinarians and the transdisciplinarians and the systems thinkers the complexity scientists not surprisingly the action researchers the sustainability scientists etc etc the challenge is that these don't talk to each other and let me just go back and these don't talk to each other and so you've got these multiple communities of practice if you like who are all trying to think about how to do with complexity and they're all doing it quite independently of each other and that makes it quite difficult for people to get kind of a general view of what's happening and so I2S or integration implementation sciences thinks of itself as the kind of plumbing that tries to bring all these together and provide a way to share resources and as I said there are strong overlaps between these but they're currently fragmented and nobody else is trying to make it their business to to kind of link things the other way that they're differentiated is on the problem type so the people who tackle problems in sustainability don't tackle don't share myths with the people who tackle problems in population health for example so again you've got this fragmentation both around approaches and around problem type so just to say a little bit more about what integration implementation sciences tries to do it's trying to develop a more comprehensive understanding of a complex problem both what is known and what is not known it's trying to provide a greater range of ways of addressing the problem including thinking about what might not work as well as might what might work and it's trying to not take action itself but to support those who are taking action and they might be policymakers or practitioners and they might be in government or business and or civil society and so what i2s is trying to do is it's trying to bring together methods to develop a more complex understanding methods tools processes frameworks to try to develop a great range of ways of addressing problems and then ways of supporting those who are actually taking action so let me just say a little bit about the vocabulary and how it came about i'm going to talk about 11 of the 14 main topics as kind of the focal point for this so i'm going to leave out three of them the one set across doubt because 11 of them are what the contribution is about and the other three kind of adjunct categories so this is about the unspoken piece of this is that this is focused on researchers and research so these are all relevant to research but we also welcome contributions that are about education and evaluation and how to institutionalize this way of thinking and approaching the world so a bit of important background information so if we just focus on transdisciplinarity which is but it's also true for systems thinking and action research and all the rest of them they don't have as far as i'm aware a systematic way of being indexed in libraries and i know that they don't have if i like codes because i've been involved in trying to get if our codes made so there's no kind of established way of cataloging or indexing work that's that is about this kind of stuff and also what's important is that nobody much cares i didn't much care until i started to work with an information scientist and and she kind of turned me on to the fact that this is actually really important stuff which you all know so just to say a little bit about how the main topics were developed it's been a three-way toggle if you like so things informing everything else and things have matured over the last 20 plus years so i do a lot of work trying to develop the theory of integration and implementation sciences and the kind of methods that are involved it's also has kind of an empirical base so every week we publish an i2 insights contribution so a contribution from somebody in the world who works on complex problems who has something to say about how to tackle these problems more effectively and i index those contributions and so it's also what makes sense in trying to index them and then as i said an information sciences colleague Karen Anderson who's who from time to time has been in a position to provide input and i should say that my naivety here is no reflection on her that it's or her competence it's it's a matter of happenstance and circumstance when we can and cannot work together and what i've been able to absorb from what she's been trying to teach me so the current state of play from my perspective is i think that the main categories the main topics categories work pretty well and they work pretty well from the perspective of the theory for i2s and they work pretty well in terms of indexing what comes in each week i've got no idea how well they work from an information science perspective um the tags need more work and the tags don't easily map onto the categories and i think they should and some tags are not much used and so they probably shouldn't be there but they're there at the moment because the repository is still quite incomplete um and the level of generality in the tags is highly variable so some are about um something quite large like modeling and some are about fairly simple single obscure concepts or tools um i just thought i'd say a little bit more about the tags not mapping easily under categories onto the main topics so some tags like modeling fit into different categories so that modeling can be about communication or decision making or integration or research implementation or stakeholder engagement or unknowns so that's six of the categories six of the main topics right there and so it's never going to fit um so there's never going to be a one-to-one if you have this category you're going to have this tag or if you have this tag it's got to be in that category um and not all tags fit a main topic so there are some like complex problems and expertise and transdisciplinary that don't kind of fit into the way that i've been thinking about main topics i don't know if that's a problem or not and i'd be really interested in some discussion on whether or not it is so i guess i've becoming been becoming more aware of the responsibilities um that come with defining a field so i mean in essence i've set up a discipline that i argue for i've defined what it is um to give you an example recently um there was a blog post on facilitated modeling and i tagged it as participatory modeling but in the field of modeling this is still an unresolved debate the participatory modellers argue that it facilitated modeling is a form of participatory participatory modeling but the facilitated models don't necessarily agree um so that you know there are decisions that i make that um but they're not consequential because it's not but the work's not really that important in the field but it could be consequential at some stage um it's pretty clear to me that others need to be involved in choosing the categories and tags but there are two problems one is as i said people aren't very interested and the other is that people don't have the same kind of level of expertise and so um i've i guess i've been thinking about it a lot more than anybody else that i know and so it's um it's tricky to then work with people who've got less expertise to try to co-create something so um that's kind of the key issues that i see at the moment so i'm really interested after we've heard erin's contribution that i'm really looking forward to in um what you've got to say and um i've provided uh megan with a with a copy of these slides for anybody who's interested and here's a bunch of ways of of getting in touch which i'd be great grateful to have more conversation with anybody who's interested