Great! I am curious why publishing has been so slow—I would have assumed it is easiest to put it up roughly immediately while the project is fresh in your mind and before the research is out of date.
Also, I was pleased to see that the time estimates stack up pretty well in my ballpark calculation:
research supply = 1.5 years * 48 work weeks/​year * 7 researchers = 504 researcher-weeks
research use = 6 weeks/​report * 3 researchers * 23 reports = 414 researcher weeks
Which is pretty close for a calculation like this I reckon :)
Thanks for this! Yeah, the research going out of date is definitely a relevant concern in some faster-moving areas. RE: easiest to put it up ~immediately—I think if our reports for clients could just be copy pasted to a public facing version for a general audience this would be true, but in practice this is often not the case, e.g. because the client has some underlying background knowledge that would be unreasonable to expect the public to have, running quotes by interviewees to see if they’re happy with being quoted publicly etc.
There’s a direct tradeoff here between spending time on turning a client-facing report to a public-facing version and just starting the next client-facing report. In most cases we’ve just prioritised the next client-facing report, but it is definitely something we want to think more about going forward, and I think our most recent round of hires has definitely helped with this.
In an ideal world the global health team just has a lot of unrestricted funding to use so we can push these things out in parallel etc, in part because it is one way (among many others we’d like to explore) of helping us increase the impact of research we’ve already done, and also because this would provide extra feedback loops that can improve our own process + work.
Thanks, makes sense re funding and tradeoffs. I think it would be understandable if you decided for some fraction of your research projects that it would be too much work to write up for a public audience, my guess would be that there is something of a bimodal distribution or something where writing it up immediately or never are best and writing it up later is dominated by immediately. Also, there may already be this somewhere that I have missed, but (except of course for any secret/​extra-sensitive projects) it seems low cost and potentially quite valuable to put up a title and perhaps just a one-para abstract of all the projects you have done/​are doing, so that anyone else researching a similar topic can reach out, or even deprioritise researching that if they know you already have and are just yet to publish.
Great! I am curious why publishing has been so slow—I would have assumed it is easiest to put it up roughly immediately while the project is fresh in your mind and before the research is out of date. Also, I was pleased to see that the time estimates stack up pretty well in my ballpark calculation: research supply = 1.5 years * 48 work weeks/​year * 7 researchers = 504 researcher-weeks research use = 6 weeks/​report * 3 researchers * 23 reports = 414 researcher weeks Which is pretty close for a calculation like this I reckon :)
Thanks for this! Yeah, the research going out of date is definitely a relevant concern in some faster-moving areas. RE: easiest to put it up ~immediately—I think if our reports for clients could just be copy pasted to a public facing version for a general audience this would be true, but in practice this is often not the case, e.g. because the client has some underlying background knowledge that would be unreasonable to expect the public to have, running quotes by interviewees to see if they’re happy with being quoted publicly etc.
There’s a direct tradeoff here between spending time on turning a client-facing report to a public-facing version and just starting the next client-facing report. In most cases we’ve just prioritised the next client-facing report, but it is definitely something we want to think more about going forward, and I think our most recent round of hires has definitely helped with this.
In an ideal world the global health team just has a lot of unrestricted funding to use so we can push these things out in parallel etc, in part because it is one way (among many others we’d like to explore) of helping us increase the impact of research we’ve already done, and also because this would provide extra feedback loops that can improve our own process + work.
Thanks, makes sense re funding and tradeoffs. I think it would be understandable if you decided for some fraction of your research projects that it would be too much work to write up for a public audience, my guess would be that there is something of a bimodal distribution or something where writing it up immediately or never are best and writing it up later is dominated by immediately. Also, there may already be this somewhere that I have missed, but (except of course for any secret/​extra-sensitive projects) it seems low cost and potentially quite valuable to put up a title and perhaps just a one-para abstract of all the projects you have done/​are doing, so that anyone else researching a similar topic can reach out, or even deprioritise researching that if they know you already have and are just yet to publish.
This is a great suggestion, thanks!