What? Producing innovative actionable knowledge

The Panel will opt for a work process that differs from standard applied research or think-tank analysis. It will privilege:

• a focus on co-construction with practitioners and member-based organizations to make the work more relevant and more informed about issues of concrete implementation; marginalized voices and communities in developing and developed countries will be closely associated to this stage;
• a combination of two streams for the identification of topics to be validated by the Advisory Board: (a) top-down process through various internal rounds of collective discussions (including with the use of preliminary surveys or international opinion polls), (b) bottom-up process with public consultations and open calls;
• a mobilization of expertise ensuring intersectoral and cross-disciplinary depth, in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of the issues and avoid biases coming from specific approaches and narrow disciplinary expertise;
• strong work principles that will ensure freedom, diversity, respect, honesty and mutual learning in the collegial work.

Knowledge production

One key dimension of the work of the Panel will be to address knowledge gaps regarding the interdependence between the main components of the social progress agenda and their coordinated implementation in societies. Such knowledge gaps will be addressed via the production of topical reports.

Co-creation and an open-ended iterative process will govern the exact definition of the topics and the final composition of author teams. The final selection of topics will be decided by the Advisory Board. The selection of topics may involve a participatory mechanism involving a larger set of stakeholders through public consultations (representative panels, emailing campaigns targeting larger communities of scholars and actors, ad hoc opinion poll surveys, etc.). In a second phase, comments and suggestions on the IPSP online portal as well as open calls could be useful inclusive tools. Specific attention will be given to marginalized voices and communities in developing and developed countries at this initial stage of the work process.

Reports will be written by author teams displaying a relevant mix of expertise of disciplines and sectoral experience, i.e., gathering actors and stakeholders from various organizations and bodies representative of the diversity of populations as well as leading scholars representing the relevant disciplines and regions of the world. Author teams will be assigned to these topics by the Coordination Council on the basis of suggestions by the Advisory Board.

According to the topic to be dealt with, a team of authors will consist of 8-12 people able to tackle the multi-faceted and inter-connected nature of the challenges and opportunities related to the topic. Each team of lead authors (LAs) will be led by two coordinating lead authors (CLAs) with different sectoral experience and international backgrounds. The CLAs will be identified first by the Advisory Board along with suggestions for LAs. Consultations between the CLAs, the Coordination Council and the Secretariat will lead to the final composition of the team of authors. All CLAs and LAs will have to sign the IPSP Code of Ethics to ensure compliance to the highest standards of intellectual freedom, diversity, respect, integrity, and honesty.

The time horizon for completion of reports is 6-18 months in order to make timely contributions on high priority topics. Adequate funding for report-writing activities will be allocated to the team leaders that will be identified by the Advisory Board. Such funding may cover fieldwork, data collection and analysis, research assistants, (limited) subcontracting, and output formatting. In-presence meetings of authors should be used with moderation, making the best use of online collaborative tools (videoconferencing, online shared repositories, writing tools). The Secretariat will offer some user-friendly solutions to help teams collaborate efficiently and without significant transaction costs.

The work language of the CLAs will be English (unless expressly requested by the majority of the team). Language diversity in the use of original sources/contents during the study phase and in the drafting of contributions by LAs during the writing phase will be encouraged thanks to available translation software.

For each report, a phase collecting comments as widely as possible from scholars and practitioners will help the authors revise their text and produce analyses and recommendations of high quality, relevance, and accessibility.

Each IPSP report should provide answers the following questions:

• What is known? Where do we stand and what are the trends?
• What is desirable? What do principles of justice suggest?
• What are the major obstacles and opportunities?
• What can be done (and by whom)?

Each IPSP report should also:

• unmask false solutions, identify consensus and disagreements among actors
• present scientific evidence, examples of inspiring initiatives and good practices
• suggest recommendations, propose actionable knowledge, roadmaps and toolkits, taking account of the fact that solutions often depend on the local contexts.

Reports will include a summary that will recap in accessible terms the main takeaway messages as well as concrete steps for actions and the associated toolkit. The Secretariat may help the teams of authors finalize the wording and the formatting of such vademecum. The reports will also lead to the preparation of various documents that will be adapted to various targeted audiences.

A different category of more focused reports may make specific case studies of particularly significant or promising experiments. Such case studies will be particularly useful on the platform, providing directly relevant material to actors interested in developing similar experiments, and therefore will contribute quite effectively to the coordination of actors around good practices and social innovations.

The IPSP approach, enshrined in its first Report, consists in adopting explicit assumptions about the underlying social objectives and values encapsulating social progress, and making recommendations conditional on such normative assumptions. This departs from the famous “policy relevant, not policy prescriptive” mantra proclaimed by the IPCC, and is meant to facilitate the use of such reports by actors. The presence of proposals and recommendations will not smuggle in value judgments and will leave the users of the reports free to disregard the conclusions that are linked to normative assumptions they do not endorse.

Reports will be circulated among the Coordination Council members before being published as an IPSP document on the International Platform for Social Progress and being disseminated through the various communication channels of the Panel.

Interventions in the political action space

The Panel intends to be active in the political action space without any partisanship or political affiliation. The overarching objective will be the promotion of the social progress agenda and of its various components and dimensions. This means that, beyond the knowledge production as well as the dissemination effort with leading international organizations and influential think tanks, the Panel will engage into two major efforts:

• Support for specific reforms, and legal, political, social or financial innovations, that would be consistent with the overall social progress agenda and would tick all the boxes of positive intersectional externalities. This support could be concretized by launching —but more likely in the first phase, joining— global collective actions pushing for change. Two prerequisites will form the basis of the clear framework needed to guide the decision-making process: (a) prior and/or ad hoc IPSP work should provide strong theoretical justification and empirical evidence to support a specific measure or initiative, (b) the main governing body of the Panel, i.e., the Coordination Council composed of twelve members of the Advisory Board, will have to approve any decision by a unanimous decision.
• Innovation in coalition-building to create a global momentum for the social progress agenda and/or some of its components. There is a shared conviction that only cross-sectoral efforts that will include benevolent leaders from government, business, philanthropy, civil society and academia, will have the potential both to impact the public realm and to lead to some concrete changes. This may imply building partnerships with leading organizations of the various sectors to move forward collectively and demonstrate that the proposed changes/reforms are supported by prominent people from the various communities. This is easier written than done, but the process of intersectoral antagonism and confrontation has failed enough not to try something different without naivety, nor idealism.

Building an open database of expertized initiatives and practices

The goal is to make it straightforward for contributors to upload their proposed material, and to make it also simple for users to locate the topics and the type of material they are looking for.

Registration on the platform will be open to all: individuals, entrepreneurs, communities, grass-root organizations, networks, scholars, funders, philanthropists, policymakers, etc. Each contributor will fill in a simple registration form (one per initiative).

There will be three main options to collect material:

• Invited contributors, entrepreneurs, communities, grass-root organizations, networks, scholars, funders, philanthropists, policymakers upload their material, and edit them projects develop/evolve/terminate.
• Collaborations with existing sectoral/thematic/regional existing online databases and repositories to develop an API that will transfer the relevant data.
• Human/AI-assisted recuperation and adaptation of existing data with individual contacting of targeted contributors.

Each uploaded initiative will get an ID, a timestamp, and a quotable DOI, acting as a window to signal activity and to enhance their visibility. Contributors will be given encrypted access token which will enable anonymous authentication, enabling ePR compliance (no cookies). The IT system will be open-source and GDPR compliant.

The database and its taxonomy will first be built and tested in English in the Beta version. Important preliminary work will have to be done on the taxonomy and its granularity: typology of projects, of activities, of themes/issues, tags for cross-sectoral initiatives. In a second phase, the goal will be to make the repository available in several languages (Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese, Swahili, Japanese, Russian, Hindi, Bengali). Adequate software would help transform speech in video into text, translate available texts, and index the contents in the proposed languages.

A special attention will be given to areas of action that will be less represented in the platform. The goal will be to showcase a strong mix of entries that would cover the key dimensions of the social progress agenda.

The benefit for contributors to the platform will come in the form of:

• email alerts about new initiatives/actors matching their profile (self-defined during the registration phase)
• comments by IPSP reviewers on their projects and/or on resources/ contacts of interest related to their activities
• direct interaction with other contributors through authenticated access (no individual email address will be publicly accessible)
• visibility gains when flagged by IPSP reviewers: (a) being featured prominently on the website, (b) receive assistance or funding to upgrade presentations, (c) being invited to present at IPSP events, etc.
• placing calls for collaborations on topics of interest to mobilize complementary expertise.

From the end-user perspective:

• The database will constitute an edited directory searchable with full text, structured indexes, and maps. It will be unique in its combination of content openness, expert assessment and user-friendliness.
• As entries in the platform will be linked according to the tags their contributors have selected, users reading the description of one initiative will find links to related entries.
• When a sufficient number of entries will be similar or cross-related, the Secretariat will produce an introductory page summarizing the common features and the specificities of these entries. These pages will eventually help form a web encyclopedia of social progress.

The database and the flagged initiatives by the decentralized expert community will provide a valuable material for IPSP teams as they will develop their work on priority themes. They will benefit from an enlarged and diversified pool of cases and examples, with the possibility to obtain new empirical evidence, to draw sharper conclusions and recommendations as well as to develop new impactful narratives.