Changing the approach for a changing need

Knowledge infrastructure for the nonprofit sector: building a new field of practice

Photo by Zhu Hongzhi on Unsplash

The nonprofit sector has a knowledge deficit. This problem and the lack of information we have about effectiveness in the sector impacts our ability to better serve people. We wrote a concept note about why we think solving the problem requires a sector-wide knowledge infrastructure paradigm shift.

As we know, there is a growing need in the nonprofit sector for more evidence-based decision-making. This is hindered in part by a collective failure to make knowledge and data more accessible and discoverable. This can’t be fixed by any individual organization, group, or platform—it’s a shared problem that needs to be addressed collectively by the entire sector.

We (Ajah) have been talking about this for a long time, and applying these concepts in our work - so we’re excited to share more about our thinking.

The field of scholarly communication is taking this approach to address similar challenges. The replication crisis helped trigger an investment of energy and attention to the structures used in scholarly comms, and how knowledge and information circulate in that sector. Most importantly, it meant the sector collectively prioritizing its own infrastructure and trying to find shared approaches.

Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is one example of how a group of organizations are working together to address the issue of shared knowledge infrastructure for their domain - it’s a collaborative of major research funders that are seeking to develop shared roadmaps, funding priorities, and learn about growing this area together. This is a sustained, collective effort by a diverse global community of practitioners, which has enabled an ever-evolving ecosystem of tools and systems that encourage or enable things like data sharing and reuse - and address the objectives and challenges identified by that community for their area. 

There are many components of the research information infrastructure that we believe can and should be readily adapted to the needs of the nonprofit sector. In many ways, the nonprofit sector has many of the same issues and needs - knowledge needs to circulate among practitioners, and we need to do a better job of collectively learning.

The question now is whether the nonprofit sector has what it takes to adopt, adapt, and improve on this structure. We think it can, and we’re exploring opportunities with others who see the potential of sector-wide information-sharing and want to put that vision to use in creating a roadmap for next steps.

If you also think we should take a collective approach to learning as a sector, and the concept note one-pager, and contact us at infrastructure@ajah.ca to see how we can build this new field of practice together