The Integration and Implementation Insights blog
Integration and Implementation Insights (also known as i2Insights) is a community weblog for researchers who are interested in sharing concepts and methods for understanding and acting on complex societal and environmental problems (problems like refugee crises, global climate change, and inequality).
The blog is run by the Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S) team (Gabriele Bammer and Peter Deane) at The Australian National University. The blog complements the i2S resources repository, which provides a range of tools for tackling complex societal and environmental problems, as well as other useful information, including journals and professional associations, where resources and like-minded colleagues can be located.
The blog is supported by a number of productive partnerships.
From time to time we make changes to the blog or have other news to report and this can be found on the ‘Blog news‘ page.
We welcome contributions about, and seek to provide an active forum for, discussing ways of dealing with:
- synthesis of knowledge from different disciplines and stakeholders
- the messiness of how components of a complex problem interact, how context can be all-important and how power can stymie or facilitate action.
- the fact that complex problems do not have perfect solutions; instead that “best possible” or “least worst” solutions are more realistic aims.
- unknowns in order to head-off, or better manage, unintended adverse consequences and unpleasant surprises
- how research can best support policy and practice change
- how to educate the next generation to better deal with complex problems
- how to make effective ways of dealing with complex problems a more central part of the academic mainstream in both research and education.
Our target audience is researchers who:
- are keen to look across the boundaries of their own expertise to exchange concepts and methods with those coming from other academic backgrounds and grappling with other problems
- want to join forces to build a community which freely shares concepts and methods for dealing with complex problems, so that these become a stronger part of the mainstream of academic research and education.
Milestones:
- November 2015: active operation started
- 2015: first contributors from Australia, the Netherlands, and USA
- December 2016: 100th blog post published
- 2016: first contributors from Austria, Brazil, Costa Rica, Finland, Germany, India, Iran, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, and Uruguay
- 2017: first contributors from Argentina, Canada, France, Kenya, Myanmar, Nigeria, Laos and Spain
- 2018: first contributors from Czech Republic, Denmark, Portugal and South Africa,
- May 2019: 1,000 followers
- July 2019: 250th blog post published
- December 2019: 48 blog posts with more than 1,000 views
- 2019: first contributors from China, Israel, Japan and Luxembourg
Annual highlights can be found in the state of the blog reviews. We also publish a range of statistics about the blog every three months.
Suggestions for improving the blog are very welcome.
The blog is a community building project for Integration and Implementation Sciences (i2S). This is a new discipline that aims to improve research impact on complex real world problems by enhancing:
- Synthesis of disciplinary and stakeholder knowledge,
- Understanding and management of diverse unknowns, and
- Provision of integrated research support for policy and practice change.
Types of blog posts
There are currently three types of blog posts:
- Community member post: Blog post written by a researcher actively involved in advancing one or more aspects of research integration and implementation. A list of authors is available.
- Synthesis blog posts: Blog post that draws together insights and lessons from previously published blog posts.
- State-of-the-blog review: Blog post about the blog itself, generally, but not always, an annual review.
Maintenance of external (URL) web-links on this website
All external web-links are functional when a blog post is published, but we do not have the resources to check functionality over time. You may therefore discover that a web-link no longer works – if that is the case, please let us know.