Open Assessors' Network
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- The Open Assessors' Network (Opasnet) is a mass collaboration project for open assessors, that is people who are willing to promote the open assessment practices in the aim to improve societal decision-making. The major part of the collaboration happens on the website of this network: http://www.opasnet.org (to be opened soon, currently we use http://heande.pyrkilo.fi).
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The Opasnet is based on the idea that assessments should no longer be done in closed expert groups that produce some static reports that may or may not answer the questions a decision-maker actually has, and that are only as credible as the expert group is. Instead, two improvements are needed. First, an assessment should be built on an explicit information need that is defined by an open deliberation between experts, decision-makers, and stakeholders. Second, everything in the assessment - including premises, data sources, modelling, and conclusions - is open to scientific criticism. To be able to perform such assessments in practice, several things must be available. The Opasnet aims to provide these things that are briefly described below (with links to more extensive pages).
- We need a common platform or workspace where all these interested people may meet and work together. In practice, the core of the system must be based on an Internet workspace, although all traditional methods of group work (such as stakeholder meetings) should still be used and are available. But the products from traditional methods should be incorporated into the core system so that everyone who were not in a meeting still can read about the conclusions. This wiki-based website works as the core platform for this mass collaboration effort.
- We need a systematic information structure for all the parts of an assessment. A crucial problem currently is that the information useful for the assessment is sparsely located. The major task of performing the assessment is to collect the relevant pieces of information and synthesise them. Also, many stakeholder involvement projects have ended up to a failure, either because a large amount of feedback was so unstructured that there were not enough resources to make anything useful out of it, or because people guessed that this would happen and did not give any feedback in the first place. Therefore, the assessment must have a clear but flexible structure where the right location of ANY relevant piece of information can fairly easily be found. This way, it will become possible to save resources in organising information. Each contributor should himself or herself find the right location for his or her comment. Although it is extra work for the contributor, he or she can more easily see the importance of the contribution. One of our slogans is: "There is no such thing as a general comment."
- The systematic information structure is performed using standardised information objects. The most important ones are called variables (descriptions of real-world phenomena), assessments (descriptions of the questions and conclusions of a particular policy need), and methods (descriptions of how to actually perform a work that is needed for an assessment). Importantly, an assessment consists of variables and the causal connections between them.
- We need a systematic way for discussion and dealing with disputes. For this, we use the approaches of pragma-dialectics, a scientific theory of argumentation that looks at argumentation as a speech act. In this view, argumentation contains both the argumenting (act) and the argument (content). The argumentation is operationalised as Talk pages (see the 'discussion' tab on the top of each page) with some practical tools to help on-line discussions. Of course, other methods for discussion are allowed, but the main contents should be transformed into the core system after the discussion, so that others can see the results.
- We need systematic methods for doing assessments. This can be a guidebook about how assessments are done in general, and methods about particular pieces of work. We are collecting work descriptions to this website (for examples, see a category for methods. We are also collecting software tools for pieces of work that are either difficult to do without existing tools, or that repeat from one assessment to another in a very similar way, thus enabling standardisation of the work. For examples, see a tool category and a category for Analytica tools.
- We need an information source that contains results from previous assessments. This information can then be utilised in other assessments either as such, or after adjustments for new situations. In any case, the more information assessors provide for others, the easier it will become to perform new assessments. The information can be either assessment models, or model results. Both types of information is provided on this website.
Preliminary versions of all of these methods, websites, tools, and information sources already exist on this website, and they are available to anyone. The Open Assessors' Network invites you to participate in making assessments and improving the system for the benefit of future decision-making and the future world.