Evidence Hub

A collective intelligence platform for mapping a community and what it knows

The Evidence Hub concept is that we need better ways to pool, map and harness what a community knows. The Evidence Hub is a collaborative knowledge-building (specifically evidence-building) web platform. It was designed in KMI by the team developing the concept of "Contested Collective Intelligence" [1,2], where it is important to understand different perspectives and support quality debates. The first Evidence Hub was developed for the Open Learning Network project [3], and further refined in the Communities of Practice for Health Visiting project [4].

An Evidence Hub provides novel visual analytics designed to give insight into, and provoke reflection on, users’ knowlege-building activity. It is designed for use by practitioner communities/networks engaged in informal learning, and by students in more formal educational contexts.

The Evidence Hub is designed to answer questions such as:

• Who in my region is working on this problem?

• Are there any partnerships between projects in these two areas, on this theme?

• What are the key challenges we’re facing?

• Who has potential solutions to these, and what’s the evidence that they work?

• What evidence-based claims can we make with confidence?

• What are the most controversial issues?

The Evidence Hub concept has morphed and migrated to other groups who have ported it to other platforms and changed the conceptual model to suit their community's specific needs [5].

[1] De Liddo, Anna; Sándor, Ágnes and Buckingham Shum, Simon (2012). Contested Collective Intelligence: rationale, technologies, and a human-machine annotation study. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 21(4-5) pp. 417–448. http://oro.open.ac.uk/31052

[2] De Liddo, Anna and Buckingham Shum, Simon (2013). The Evidence Hub: harnessing the collective intelligence of communities to build evidence-based knowledge. In: Large Scale Ideation and Deliberation Workshop, 29 June - 02 July 2013, Munich, Germany. http://oro.open.ac.uk/38002

[3] De Liddo, Anna; Buckingham Shum, Simon; McAndrew, Patrick and Farrow, Robert (2012). The open education evidence hub: a collective intelligence tool for evidence based policy. In: Cambridge 2012: Joint OER12 and OpenCourseWare Consortium Global 2012 Conference, 16 - 18 April 2012, Cambridge, UK. http://oro.open.ac.uk/33253

[4] Ikioda, F. , Kendall, S. , Brooks, F. , De Liddo, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2013) Factors That Influence Healthcare Professionals’ Online Interaction in a Virtual Community of Practice. Social Networking, 2, 174-184. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/sn.2013.24017

[5] Open Education Research Hub: http://oerresearchhub.org

Jane Whild

Anna De Liddo

Piccolo, L., Alani, H., De Liddo, A. and Baranauskas, C. (2014) Motivating online engagement and debates on energy consumption, ACM Web Science 2014, Bloomington, US, pp. 109-118, ACM

Buckingham Shum, S., De Liddo, A. and Klein, M. (2014) DCLA Meet CIDA: Collective Intelligence Deliberation Analytics, Workshop: 2nd Int. Workshop on Discourse-Centric Learning Analytics at 4th Int. Conf. on Learning Analytics & Knowledge., Indianapolis, USA