Seventh annual review

By Gabriele Bammer

gabriele-bammer_nov-2021
Gabriele Bammer (biography)

This annual end-of-year review presents the highlights from 2022 and examines how i2Insights is progressing in building a global community and a repository for sharing research tools to tackle complex societal and environmental problems.

There is currently no other repository that provides easy access to a range of research tools for addressing complex problems in ways that bring together systems thinking, transdisciplinarity, action research, post-normal science, implementation science, design thinking and many more approaches.

Progress is in the right direction, but the i2Insights team is keen to go further and faster. How can the number of contributions and readers be increased? What would you find helpful for i2Insights to do more of or differently? How can we promote productive discussions on more contributions? If you have thought about contributing but have not, what’s stopping you? 

This is the last blog post for 2022. i2Insights returns on January 10, 2023 (Australian time).

There are plenty of ways to catch-up on what you might have missed in i2Insights while the team takes a break. You can scroll through the list of all posts or through the blog scroll. If you are interested in a particular topic, the index or advanced search will help you find what has been contributed.

Highlights of 2022

Overall, i2Insights has published 449 posts by 565 authors from 47 countries. Contributions to i2Inisghts have been read in 190 of the 193 countries that are members of the United Nations. More statistics are available.

Significant milestones in 2022 were:

Focus on systems thinking with i2Insights Ambassador Cathy Hobbs

i2Insights Ambassador, Cathy Hobbs, is championing improved coverage of systems thinking in i2Insights. She evocatively describes the challenge as: “at the supermarket [of useful tools], the systems thinking ‘products’ are nailed to the top shelf (and likely gathering the dust in some cases).” Our aim is to bring them to the accessible shelves at eye level. This year i2Insights has published:

Advertising strategy

We have focused our limited resources on two social media outlets – Twitter and LinkedIn, which are equally important in attracting views. We are sticking with Twitter for now, but welcome advice on other outlets to consider.

Each quarter we produce i2S News with the latest developments in Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S). We have started providing more detailed highlights from i2Insights. In the October-December 2022 issue we highlighted this year’s contributions from Armenia, Georgia, India and Brazil:

Finally, if you don’t already, you can get an e-mail every time a new i2Insights contribution is published – sign up under “Get notifications about new posts” in the right hand column.

Playing in the data

The annual review is an opportunity to play in the data that WordPress provide about views and viewers, going beyond the monthly summary sent to contributors and the quarterly reviews published in the i2Insights statistics. It is an occasion to look at what i2Insights has achieved and how much further there is to go, as well as to strategise on whether there are new ways to try to achieve our goals.

It’s a time to celebrate the contributions that have done well and to ponder on why others did not attract as many viewers. It’s a time to renew commitment to building a truly global community, as each country benefits from being able to draw on every country’s experiences, insights and tools. In addition to the most viewed posts of 2022 (see below), we’ll be tweeting and posting on LinkedIn over the break about various contributions. 

Most viewed contributions from 2022

Eight contributions published in 2022 were viewed more than 900 times:

Last word for 2022

Please don’t be shy about submitting an i2Insights contribution – you don’t need to be invited! If necessary, we are happy to help you edit it into i2Insights house style. Our aim is to make it as easy as possible for you to share concepts, methods and other ‘tools’ that improve everyone’s ability to tackle complex societal and environmental problems. We welcome “golden oldies,” as well as new tools.

i2Insights is a great way to promote work that you’ve published. A few years ago we worked with one of our partners, the journal GAIA, to assess views of a number of articles before and after publishing i2Insights contributions. We found that i2Inisghts contributions led to a marked uptick in views of the original articles.

The range of contributions in i2Insights helps illuminate the many aspects of research tackling complex societal and environmental problems. Through each week’s contributions we aim to alert researchers and other readers to useful tools: they may reinforce work you already do, or challenge your thinking, or provide new ideas to chew on. Collecting the contributions into a repository, and providing an index and an advanced search function, aims to help you re-find a tool that may have piqued your attention when you first saw it or to review what’s available on a topic of interest.

What were the i2Insights highlights for you in 2022? Other feedback and suggestions are also welcome!

Acknowledgements: Thanks to everyone who has helped make i2Insights a success, especially the authors, commenters and i2Insights Ambassadors. And I reiterate my acknowledgement from last year to Peter Deane, who is an invaluable colleague in implementing the vision for i2Insights. He carefully manages all the technical aspects, provides a wise sounding board and generally infuses the production of i2Insights with good sense, informed by his own interests both in transdisciplinarity and in providing the best possible experience for i2Insights readers.

Biography: Gabriele Bammer PhD is Professor of Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at The Australian National University in Canberra. i2S provides theory and methods for tackling complex societal and environmental problems, especially for synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge, understanding and managing diverse unknowns, and providing integrated research support for policy and practice change.

5 thoughts on “Seventh annual review”

  1. Hi Gabriele–this is an impressive accomplishment and I appreciate the work invested in making this such a useful resource, while advancing the discipline. Have an even more spectacular 2023. Happiest of holidays. Jim

    Reply
  2. Likewise, thanks for such a fantastic resource. Was singing your praises (again) at a recent presentation in London for Global Alliance on Chronic Disease…

    Reply
  3. Thanks for a great year of ideas that never fail to stimulate my thinking about how we can improve empowerment of an organisation to emerge new knowledge through applying new and multiple lenses to their in-house knowledge. i2Insights style of sharing how others tackle the tasks we all face regularly is a catalysts for more transdisciplinarity engagement. I agree with Cathy Hobbs it would be great to have more contributions about how practitioners of systems thinking approaches are engaging their clients in adopting consistent use and understanding of this holistic method for embracing social and environmental issues.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: