Obstacles and drawbacks hampering the use of Open Risk Assessment

This page is a collection of reasons (methodological, technical, practical, psychological, and so on) that from experience are known/deemed to hamper the use of Open Risk Assessment (ORA).

GOAL: By expressing the problems and recognizing the most urgent ones, this collection should be useful for aiding the further development of ORA and its wider acceptance and usage.

Suggestions for solutions may also be presented on this page.

Experiences from the Helsinki CCZ case

Practical inconvenience and additional work due to breaking apart an assessment into separate wikipages

At the starting point, the Helsinki workplan was a single contiguous (bulleted) text, making it easy to scroll and edit, to print/export the text for reports, to get a quick overview of the extent and stage of work, and to see the entire hierarchy of titles and subtitles (in the automatic contents).

Breaking the text apart into separate variables (wikipages) will complicate/prevent the above tasks, especially:

1. creating a need to jump back and forth between many wikipages
2. requiring additional work for printing/exporting the separate pages for reports
3. making it more laborious to estimate the stage of completion

Alleviation to #1: The "Use breadcrumbs" option in the wiki-user preferences makes it easy to return to previous pages.

Concerns about publication rights and authorship

Insofar as scientific publications are planned to be written about (or based on) this impact assessment (IA), open participation creates some worries/concerns about publication rights:

• who will be the authors of the publication(s), if a large number of persons will contribute to the IA, but with greatly differing levels of contribution?
• can one be confident that parts of the unpublished work (e.g. methods, structure, ideas, etc.) will not become subject to plagiarism, because of the open participation? (even when the participation is restricted, the information might spread further)

Reluctancy for revealing erroneous/preliminary work to other researchers

Due to the extent of the Helsinki IA, the novelty of most of the contents for the main author, and the limitations of time, some of the (early) contents is bound to be erroneous or poorly thought-of, making it somewhat unpleasant to reveal the contents to fellow researchers.

Partial solution: All participants need to be prepared to take a fruitful attitude for making IAs. New IAs are never complete from the start. When inviting new participants to join an IA, one must inform them about the gradually evolving nature of the work, as well as of the resource constraints. In early stages of the assessment, the presence (and even predominance) of gaps, inaccuracy, and errors should not be viewed as demerits, but rather as the natural starting point for joint elaboration. After all, this is a key argument for open participation. Furthermore, due to the interlinked requirements for data and sub-models, and the many practical uncertainties (such as the availability of data of various qualities and from various sources), IAs often also exhibit an iterative character, which may require several rounds of revision and re-definition for some parts of the assessment. Thus, preliminary and temporary choices will likely be necessary, especially in the early stages of the assessment.