From the early days of Public Digital, research has been an important part of what we do. We know technology, policy and society all move quickly. We believe strongly in being open to new ideas and staying intellectually sharp. We want to find evidence and stories that get past the marketing glare and into the messy realities of organisational change. Doing research is an important part of that.
One of the challenges we’ve found is that there are almost too many interesting topics to explore. So to help focus our effort, we’ve published a research agenda. This agenda sets out the 6 topics we want to dig into over the next year or two. The topics are:
Digital public goods
Funding models and economic growth
Identity
Sustainability
Inclusivity, equity and social impact
Welfare systems
We don’t think these topics are the only relevant ones. But based on what we read, where we work, and the feedback we’ve had from friends and colleagues around the world, we’re confident there is value in finding out more about them.
We’ve set ourselves a few guiding rules.
First, we don’t want to do this on our own
We want to partner with other organisations - funders, collaborators, researchers - and use this agenda to make connections as well as to learn new things.
Second, we want to do this in a way that is ‘of the internet’
We don’t want to publish PDF documents nobody reads. We will strive not to be boring. Sometimes we will write reports, but there might be other outputs too. And of course, we want to do it in the open, so that others can hopefully benefit from what we learn.
Finally, and most importantly, we want our research to be global
Our work has covered six continents, so our thinking should aspire to the same broad perspective.
We would welcome feedback on the agenda - take a look here. In particular, we would love to hear from organisations who would like to fund, collaborate or exchange ideas on these topics. If that’s you, please get in touch: andrew.greenway@public.digital.
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