Seventh annual review

By Gabriele Bammer

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:

• first contributor from Peru
• reaching 30,000 views in a month (in November)
• reaching 20,000 visitors in a month (in October and November)
• publishing a new primer on Understanding Diversity with an accompanying video primer on YouTube
• starting the process of consolidating the repository of tools on the i2S website into the i2Insights repository. 
• completing the re-indexing of i2Insights. In January 2020 we developed an index for i2Insights, with definitions for each of the terms used (thanks to Caryn Anderson for her advice on this!). In addition to using (and expanding) the index going forward, we also set ourselves the task of re-indexing all the contributions published between 2015 and 2019, which involved reviewing the tags assigned to them and defining tags that were not already included in the index. This task was completed in December 2022. As resources become available in future, we’ll look at how the index can be improved.
• seven contributions achieving more than 7,500 lifetime views, namely:
  • A guide to ontology, epistemology and philosophical perspectives for interdisciplinary researchers by Katie Moon and Deborah Blackman (almost 300K views)
  • A guide for interdisciplinary researchers: Adding axiology alongside ontology and epistemology by Peter Deane (more than 31K views)
  • Understanding values: Schwartz theory of basic values by Shalom H. Schwartz (more than 14K views)
  • Successful implementation demands a great liaison person: Nine tips on making it work by Abby Haynes on behalf of CIPHER (Centre for Informing Policy in Health with Evidence from Research) (almost 11K views)
  • What makes government policy successful? by Jo Luetjens, Michael Mintrom and Paul ’t Hart (more than 8K views)
  • Idea tree: A tool for brainstorming ideas in cross-disciplinary teams by Dan Stokols, Maritza Salazar, Gary Olson and Judith Olson (more than 7.7K views)
  • Three theories to help overcome change resistance in service design implementation by Ricardo Martins (more than 7.6K views)

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:

• Four building blocks of systems thinking by Derek Cabrera and Laura Cabrera (more than 1.5K views)
• Assessing assumptions about boundaries with critical systems heuristics by Werner Ulrich (more than 900 views)
• Systems thinking in public policy: Making space to think differently by Catherine Hobbs (almost 900 views)
• Extending the DPSIR (Driving forces, Pressures, States, Impacts, Responses) framework by Will Allen (almost 300 views)
• A responsible approach to intersectionality by Ellen Lewis and Anne Stephens (almost 600 views).

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:

• Implementing transdisciplinary research in post-Soviet Armenia and Georgia by Tigran Keryan and Tamara Mitrofanenko (almost 400 views)
• Insights into interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity in India and Brazil by Marcel Bursztyn and Seema Purushothaman (more than 300 views)
• Adaptive skilling by Seema Purushothaman (more than 300 views).

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:

• Understanding values: Schwartz theory of basic values by Shalom H. Schwartz (more than 14K views)
• Four building blocks of systems thinking by Derek Cabrera and Laura Cabrera (more than 1.5K views)
• Stakeholder engagement: Learning from Arnstein’s ladder and the IAP2 spectrum by Gabriele Bammer (almost 1.5K views)
• A collaborative vision and pathways for transforming academia by The Care Operative and “Transforming Academia” workshop participants at 2021 International Transdisciplinarity Conference (more than 1.1K views)
• Collaboration agreement template by L. Michelle Bennett, Edgar Cardenas and Michael O’Rourke (more than 1K views)
• Understanding diversity primer: 1. Why diversity? by Gabriele Bammer (almost 1K views)
• Assessing assumptions about boundaries with critical systems heuristics by Werner Ulrich (almost 950 views)
• Why complex problems need abductive reasoning by Mariana Zafeirakopoulos (more than 900 views)

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.