RRI Tools

The development of this Open Platform has been led by the ISGlobal team in deep collaboration with the Data Science and OpenSystems research groups at the Barcelona University. All InSPIRES consortium members have also played an important role in its inception and evolution

Anne-Sophie Gresle, Anna Cigarini, Leonardo de la Torre Avila, Irene Jimeno, Franco Bagnoli, Herman Dempere, Mireia Ribera, Eloi Puertas, Josep Perelló & María Jesús Pinazo.

The InSPIRES Open Platform, an online crowdsourced platform featuring citizen-led participatory R&I projects promoted by knowledge intermediary units, such as Science Shops, Citizen Science groups, etc

InSPIRES has embarked in the adventure of developing an online collaborative and crowdsourced database featuring Science Shops, similar structures and their related projects, as well as offering an integrated impact evaluation tool capable of producing real-time project evaluation report.

The aims of the InSPIRES online database and impact evaluation are to:

• Identify and visualize the size of the Science Shops, and other similar structures, movement and similar structures worldwide.
• Register collaborative research and innovation projects, facilitated by these intermediation structures , to show their objectives, knowledge and geographical areas, as well as the main collaborators involved.
• Provide to the community an intuitive and customizable impact evaluation tool to capture process and results outcomes in a harmonized manner.

In the end, we hope that the platform will support the community (structure coordinators and project’s participants around the world) mutual learning by sharing science Shops experiences and other participatory research and innovation projects good but also failed practices, methodologies, etc.

The Platform also offers an integrated impact evaluation tool capable of producing real-time evaluation reports.

Participatory research keeps expanding to connect science and society through engaging projects using a multi-stakeholder strategy, including citizens. However, each participatory project follows different evaluation formats and strategies. This results in limiting evidences on best practices, hindering the scaling up of Participatory Research. The project has developed an innovative and online-based evaluation strategy which is valid for Participatory Research initiatives labelled as Science Shops or Citizen Science. The strategy challenges those teams that want to undergo a self-reflection process during and after their project is active. An online-tool gathers and automatically analyses data in a harmonized way among projects. The tool delivers back a set of pieces of information through different visualizations which analyze each project’s process in five dimensions, selected-constructed after a careful revision of public engagement and impact evaluation criteria proposed by different projects and researchers.

The dimensions evaluated by this online instrument are: (i) Knowledge Democracy, (ii) Citizen-led Research, (iii) Participatory Dynamics, (iv) Integrity, and (v) Transformative Change. Online-based self-evaluation questionnaires were designed and personalized according to the profile of the respondents and are sent out by email in four different stages to capture the momentum of the project, as well as its short-term and mid-term impacts. The quantitative and qualitative evaluation instrument is featured within the InSPIRES Open Platform (OP) which becomes an open repository that allows comparison among participatory projects.