News – APO Blog

Highlights from the KM2018 conference

In the first week of July, Amanda Lawrence and I attended the Knowledge Mobilisation Conference (KM2018) in Sydney, hosted by the Sax Institute. It was a packed event, with an audience of about 60 per cent researchers, 20 per cent policy makers, and the rest somewhere in between.

Amanda presenting at KM2018 — Amanda presenting at 2018 Knowledge Mobilisation conference in Sydney

bridge

The discussions and workshops were all about ways to bridge the gap between researchers and policy makers. The focus was on health, but the learnings are applicable across all public policy.

My key points from the conference:

Finding, building and sustaining relationships

Researchers are challenged by the situation where people in government adviser roles change frequently, making it difficult to engage, and sustain engagement.

And from the other side, it is hard to ‘find an expert’.

While at the same time it is recognised that relationship building, and ‘deliberative dialogues’, help with knowledge translation.

Speaking the right language, as well as listening the right way Continue reading “Highlights from the KM2018 conference”

Catch APO at conferences and events in 2018

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APO will be out and about in the coming months, attending many conferences and events – if you see us come and say hello!

June

HealthInfoNet Roundtable

APO Director Amanda Lawrence presented at the HealthInfoNet Roundtable on 6 June in Melbourne. HealthInfoNet is an organisation ‘helping to close the gap by providing the evidence base to inform practice and policy in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health’. HealthInfoNet have recently updated their website, and have developed a short video on the redesign. This site is crucial to anyone working in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait health sector.

HealthInfoNet Melbourne Roundtable speakers_June 2018 — HealthInfoNet Melbourne Roundtable speakers, June 2018

VCOSS Good Life Summit

With a state election coming up in Victoria, the Victorian Council of Social Service VCOSS Good Life Summit on 13 June delivered a terrific day of presentations, conversations and networking across the policy and social sectors. In the words of VCOSS: ‘Delivering a good life for all Victorians, regardless of their background or individual circumstances, must be on the agenda for the 2018 State Election, and beyond.’ summit_webbanner (1).png

Amanda Lawrence and Michelle Zwagerman attended the event with thanks to our partnership with VCOSS. Continue reading “Catch APO at conferences and events in 2018”

APO data live in Research Data Australia

After a long project we are very pleased to say that APO as a database as well as all of the datasets we host are now able to be searched and accessed via Research Data Australia.

And we have a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) for APO so if you want to cite APO as a whole – if you are perhaps writing about the importance of open access databases as a source of evidence for public policy or that you used APO overall for a project – please include doi.org/10.4225/50/5b15c09dbc286 in your reference as it will help us to to trace this more easily.

Research Data Australia is a project of the Australian National Data Service which helps researchers find, access, and reuse data from over one hundred Australian research organisations, government agencies, and cultural institutions. It does not store the data itself but provides descriptions of, and links to, the data from their data publishing partners such as APO. Research Data Australia caters specifically for researchers but also has broader relevance to others including policy makers, educators and business people. Continue reading “APO data live in Research Data Australia”

APO Forum 2018 – save the date!

APO ANNUAL FORUM

In 2017 APO held its first public forum to celebrate our 15 year anniversary and bring together key partners and friends to discuss some of the many pressing issues in the delivery of evidence-informed public policy and better access and use of research. Videos of the presentations are available here.

This was the first of what we now consider to be an annual event. So please mark your calendars for the 2018 APO Annual Forum which will be held on Thursday 25 October in Melbourne – again at the Engineers Australia conference space in the city. It is the day after the Global Evidence and Implementation conference so a great week to be in Melbourne!

If you have any thoughts or suggestions for the program please get in touch with Emily Silvester (esilvester@apo.org.au) or Michelle Zwagerman (mzwagerman@apo.org.au) – it is still very open at this stage. We will be finalising the program in August following discussion with the APO Advisory Board and input from the APO community.

APO website updates

The APO website has undergone some improvements lately. These changes include the addition of the My APO button on the home page for quick access to the APO dashboard, a dedicated Advertise page, and a Footer to improve navigation.

The My APO dashboard update applies to all contributors and advertisers who upload content to the site as well as website users employing the bookmarking tool.

Dashboard myAPO

Users need to be registered and logged in to access the My APO dashboard. Once they are in the My APO dashboard view, they will have access to all their listings and bookmarks. Users can add new blocks to the dashboard configuration simply by clicking on ‘Add a block’.

Add a block view

Continue reading “APO website updates”

Welcome to Les Kneebone – APO Information Architect

Les’ enduring interest is in thesauri, aka taxonomies, aka subject headings – however you put it, Les loves controlled vocabularies! Following management of ScOT (Schools Online Thesaurus), Les now manages vocabularies and implements ontologies (joins the dots) in the policy and research data management domain.

Les has worked in information management roles in government, school, community and research sectors since 2002. He mainly contributed to managing metadata, taxonomies and cataloguing standards used in these sectors.

Before graduating in Information Management at RMIT, Les gained post-graduate qualifications in Sociology and the History and Philosophy of Science (Queensland University of Technology and and University of Melbourne).

Les is a non-cardigan-wearing librarian and enjoys powerlifting, satirical news and pointing out inappropriate quotation marks in signs.

A very warm welcome to the APO team Les!

Workshopping the interface between APO and ADA

Early in May, Dr Steve McEachern and Janet McDougall from Australian National University (ANU) joined Dr Ahsan Morshed from Swinburne University’s Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, and the APO team to workshop the sharing of information between APO and the Australian Data Archive (ADA).

Lots of exciting opportunities were identified, along with the usual list of challenging issues to overcome to make these ideas become reality.

Watch this space as we share our journey and discoveries through the Linked Semantic Platforms project.