Peter Cruickshank (very much lead author) and I are delighted that our paper An information literacy lens on community representation for participatory budgeting in Brazil is now published. Check it out on the Journal of Information Literacy’s website or Edinburgh Napier University’s repository[1]. Also check out Peter’s post on the Social Informatics research group blog.
Continue readingFive years ago – in 2018 – Dr Wegene Demeke and I were awarded £10,000 from the Global Challenges Research Fund for a visit to São Paulo City, Brazil, to begin to investigate the extent to which participatory budgeting (PB – Orçamento Participativo in Portuguese) benefits the very poor. Our research visit took place in January 2019, but it has taken to now – May 2023 – to get a paper accepted for publication. So why did this process take 5 years?
Continue readingThe Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) ‘is a £1.5 billion fund announced by the UK Government in late 2015 to support cutting-edge research that addresses the challenges faced by developing countries’. Its delivery partners include the Scottish Funding Council (SFC). Earlier this year, I was commissioned by the SFC to produce a web-map of the GCRF projects it funds.
I was invited to present about the map at the SFC’s GCRF sector meeting at the sector meeting on 29 October.
Hence a major part of this post is to record what Isaid about the map. The other major part is slightly edited versions of my live-tweets from the meeting. The rest of the post is Bruce-thoughts tweeted at the time, in (round brackets), and Bruce-thoughts that occurred while writing this post, in [square brackets].
My work was very well received, so I am very happy to have boosted my reputation (and that of Edinburgh Napier University), with representatives of the other Scottish universities, and with a significant research-funder.
All photos and information reported below are © the presenters and their relevant colleagues. Click the images to see the full-size versions. Continue reading
With thanks to the speakers for permission to share them, here are the slides for most of the presentations at this event
This workshop was presented by Professor Mark Reed. It was aimed at researchers at Edinburgh Napier University intending to apply for Global Challenges Research Funding. This post is based on my notes from the day, so the good things here are from Mark, and any mistakes are by me. Readers should also check out Mark’s Fast Track Impact website, especially the resources section. Mark can be contacted via pa@fasttrackimpact.com or via @fasttrackimpact
In this post , the words ‘project’, ‘research’, and ‘researcher’ should be read as ‘GCRF-funded project’, ‘GCRF-funded research’ and ‘GCRF-funded researcher’. My post–facto comments are in block quotes. Click the thumbnail images to see full-size versions. Continue reading
Today I was at a one-day information event run by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) on the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). According to UKRI, the GCRF is a ‘a £1.5 billion fund announced by the UK Government in late 2015 to support cutting-edge research that addresses the challenges faced by developing countries’. Also, ‘GCRF forms part of the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) commitment.’ My paraphrase is that GCRF funds research specifically to do good things™.
It’s already been good for me and my colleague Wegene Demeke because it funded our research in Brazil earlier this year. Now the onus is on us to follow up that 3-week project with a bigger piece of research leading to positive impacts on Brazilian society. So I was keen to learn more about how to do this from the funders themselves. In fact I was so keen I was on an aarrgghh-o’clock train this morning to sunny Glasgow. (I am not usually capable of simultaneous speech and locomotion, let alone anything approximating to thought, before about 10am.)
Below the cut are my notes (edited for legibility) and photos of slides. I believe slides will be circulated, so I should eventually be able to replace the photos with better images.
Bruce's IT-ish world 