Some times, scientists create new knowledge, but it can be really hard for the people who it will impact to access and use that knowledge. This disconnect can occur for a variety of reasons and is really frustrating for everyone involved. As scientists, we want to see our work helping our communities, and as professionals and communities that could benefit from our work, you want this knowledge as soon as possible so that it does protect you in the next natural hazard event.
At R-CET, we are working on a variety of ways to ensure that our science is in your hands as fast as possible. This can be seen when you look through our work in our Science to Practice workstream, but today we want to focus on our stakeholder advisory group.
To help expediate sharing our work with people who can use it on a large scale, we have asked a group of decision makers from across Aotearoa to meet with us periodically. During these meetings, we can provide updates on our work (even before it is published) and ask for their feedback. This feedback isn't about the work itself but about how we can help them use our work to improve all of our lives through their organisation. For example, as we create tools to run some of the new data processing techniques we have developed, these decision makers can tell us what sort of outputs they would like from the tools. Do their internal processes prefer one data type or another? How do they access these tools so that the tools interface well with their internal processes to help them make decisions? Who is using this data and how? All of these are the types of questions we ask to make sure they can use our data.
We had our first meeting with our stakeholders just last week and really loved how interested they were in our work. We are really excited by the synergies across our work and theirs and are looking forward to seeing where these partnerships take us over the next five years.