Matchmaking social scientists and community organizations

These are notes from a meeting at Social Science Foo Camp 2018. Feel free to edit and improve these—especially if you were there!

Scope or concept: Small and medium-sized community organizations and nonprofits typically don't have the resources to do their own research but often have incredible access to data and/or the opportunity to test social scientific theories. How can we support matching-making between these groups?

General approaches

• Client-based models, especially in the context of classes where students can work directly with organizations
• Cooperative education - e.g., as practiced at Northeastern University
• Case-study based methods (either as part of research or teaching)
• Capstone projects, especially as used in engineering education might provide opportunities; perhaps support cooperation between engineering and social science students?
• Working with large "network-based" NGOs which are already in the business of providing service and/or information to their member organizations.
• Funding can be thought of in terms of "twin funding" where a scientific grant from NSF/NIH/etc that supports the basic science is treated as complementary to a grant from a private foundation aimed at scale, deployment, etc.

Groups doing things in this space

• Research for Impact — "Research4Impact builds exciting, new, and personalized relationships between researchers and practitioners!"
• Data for Democracy — "To be an inclusive community for data scientists and technologists to volunteer and collaborate on projects that make a positive impact on society. "
• HIBAR - "The Highly Integrative Basic and Responsive (HIBAR) Research Alliance is a network of research leaders who believe that universities can improve their research outcomes and increase their benefits to society through the advancement of HIBAR research, which builds upon excellence in basic research as well as excellence in application and societal engagement. HIBAR research thus maximizes innovation and the potential for research collaboration among academic institutions, business and industry, and government agencies. To do so, it adopts the high standard of research quality established and led by the best fundamental university research."
• Swearer Center at Brown — "We connect students, faculty and community partners through community engagement, engaged scholarship and social innovation."
• Engineers without Borders - "Engineers Without Borders USA builds a better world through engineering projects that empower communities to meet their basic human needs. Our highly skilled volunteers work with communities to find appropriate solutions for their infrastructure needs."

I could find the link for this but someone mentioned:

• "Design for Defense" — a class somewhere (perhaps at Stanford?)

Problems and suggestions

• Organizations often struggle to formulate problems and/or the question os pf problem definition provides a barrier to collaboration. An effective organization would target this part of the problem.
• Organizations often want people to work on theoretically uninteresting problem? What we can do with these? Perhaps these types of collaboration might still be very useful for students learning methods?
• Time horizons can be very different (e.g., organizations want answers for the next board meeting while academics might be thinking of a publication in several years!)
• Scale can be different. Academics might be interested in generalizability or simply be uninterested in issues of scaling after the theory is tested or the intervention is run once.
• Can academic publishers help? How might journals document research in this way systematically that supports this kind of outreach.