5 October 2015
A Call for Knowledge in the Age of Big Data
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It is not information alone that is pivotal in the course of human events, but how that information is taken up, understood, and acted upon; how that information is turned into knowledge and from knowledge to action.

“Knowledge is power,” goes the old adage. Whether Sir Francis Bacon or Thomas Hobbes (or someone else entirely) said it first, the fact that it still holds true today – in this epoch of big data and nigh-on endless information – is illuminating. For it is not information alone that is pivotal in the course of human events, but how that information is taken up, understood, and acted upon; how that information is turned into knowledge and from knowledge to action.

Precisely how information is turned into knowledge, and when the one officially becomes the other, is a matter of esoteric debate. But for most people the broad concept that information is only valuable when it is learned and put to use is self-evident. It follows that ensuring information is available, understood and acted upon is itself a valuable occupation, and, in the aforementioned age of big data and oceans of information, becoming increasingly difficult. This is certainly true in the cross-cutting issues of climate change and international development. In 1992, Google Scholar returned around 76,000 articles to a search on climate change. By 2014, there were over 1.7 million articles and more than 300 think tanks working on climate change.

For farmers, urban planners, marine biologists, utility engineers, investment managers or any of the thousands of professions sensitive to a changing climate, the challenge in 2015 lies in finding information that may be useful to practical decision making, and making sense of it. The Climate Knowledge Brokers Group (CKB), a burgeoning community of knowledge specialists representing a range of fields connected to climate change and international development, emerged in 2012 to address these challenges. On 17 September, the group released the Climate Knowledge Brokers Manifesto, a joint call to action for drastically improving the climate knowledge landscape.

The Manifesto’s contributors, which include individuals from nearly 20 organizations, such as the Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), the UNFCCC Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN), the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Institute (REEEP), and others, say it is the job of knowledge brokers to interpret, sort, translate and integrate information, tailoring for the specific needs of a variety of audiences, from policy planners to scientists to consumers and voting publics.

But what does knowledge brokering look like in real life, and how do we as producers and consumers of knowledge avoid the pitfalls inherent in this role? How do we walk the perhaps fine line between tailoring information so that it is useful to someone in their work, and tailoring it so that it delivers only the message we want to transmit?

In reality, knowledge brokers are rarely a single node connecting a creator and a consumer of knowledge. Rather, within complex knowledge systems we can discern “chains” of knowledge brokers, along which information is pared, bent, reformulated, enriched and transformed at every turn. A student in the field takes a soil sample, which is analyzed in the lab and plugged into a model, which may then form the basis of a new scientific viewpoint, which is peer-reviewed and published in a journal before making its way into related broader studies, which in turn form the basis of still further publications, put together by international agencies, think tanks or others aimed at distilling their meaning for a particular audience.

The CKB Manifesto sets out seven principles central to improving how these chains function, and in doing so improve decision making and resiliency in the coming decades of climate action. The principles revolve around the importance of transparency and collaboration in climate knowledge brokering: transparency in information, so that users at any stage of the chain can confirm sources, check validity and understand context; collaboration across sectors and disciplines to better understand the needs of knowledge consumers, to act in concert to address those needs, and to learn together from experience.

That the 80-odd knowledge brokers interviewed for the Manifesto represent such a broad spectrum of academic, political and practical fields dealing with climate-related and development issues is a testament to its necessity. That they represent many of the leading institutions in their respective fields shows their goals, lofty as they perhaps seem, are achievable.

For CKB, the Manifesto represents the beginning of a new age, one of open data and broad collaboration, an age, perhaps, of Big Knowledge.

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