Column Editor’s Note: In this Effective Policy Learning article, Daniel T. O’Brien and Kimberly D. Lucas of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs and the Boston Area Research Initiative at Northeastern University discuss the trend of cross-institutional, data-driven collaborations that both drive science but influence societal outcomes. They present best practices that have emerged for this type of “civic research” that emphasize building partnerships among participants through a variety of trust-building mechanisms. Spread over a community, civic research could incorporate a broad array of stakeholders and participants and result in numerous collaborative projects to address problems facing a particular region. Using the Boston Area Research Initiative annual conference as a source of use cases that highlight best practices, O’Brien and Lucas present a model and lessons for other regions, with the intent of inspiring other communities to organize around a similar infrastructure adapted for their own cities.

Keywords: civic research; smart & connected communities; urban informatics; cross-sector collaboration; science, technology, and society

Cross-institutional, data-driven collaborations are a growing trend, inspired by the idea that research can simultaneously have societal impact while also advancing science. This approach has become especially popular in place- or region-based efforts, sometimes referred to as ‘urban informatics,’ ‘smart & connected communities,’ ‘publicly engaged research,’ or, as we do here, ‘civic research.’ As such work proliferates, best practices have emerged for designing and sustaining collaborations to ensure success, including the quippy tenet, ‘partnerships over projects.’ This emphasizes how collaborators need to establish trusting relationships and shared vision for the value and use of data and science. And while partnership is necessary for projects to succeed, established partnerships are more likely to generate multiple meaningful, interconnected, impactful projects.

We can take the guidance of partnerships over projects a step further, however. Whereas a partnership might generate multiple projects, a civic research community might spawn dozens of partnerships and thus hundreds of projects. A civic research community spans the diverse array of researchers; policymakers; practitioners; and nonprofit, corporate, and grassroots leaders all committed to the use of data and science to address a broad set of opportunities and challenges. In place-based work, this entails the many issues facing a region, from housing to transportation and beyond.

A civic research community does not emerge on its own. It requires infrastructure—that is, programming, activities, and resources—that enables its many members to learn together. This column describes one example of such infrastructure: the Boston Area Research Initiative’s annual conference, which convenes the civic research community of greater Boston to share results from existing projects and partnerships and to foster new ones. Not only is the conference rare (or even unique) in its mission, it has been established and refined over nearly a decade, offering a model and lessons for other cities. In this column we strive to illuminate the ways that such infrastructure can unlock the power of civic research communities, while inspiring readers worldwide to implement their own conferences (or allied strategies!) elsewhere.

Projects, Partners, and Communities

Cross-sector projects are powerful tools for impact. They merge the technical and theoretical skills of scientists with the multifaceted expertise of policymakers and practitioners (O’Brien, 2018). The latter is crucial for posing questions with practical value, interpreting results vis-à-vis real-world context, and developing dissemination and implementation strategies that benefit communities. But such projects have severe limitations if they are treated as one-offs, as they can only move ‘as fast as the speed of trust,’ as is often said. Establishing trusting relationships is nontrivial. Individuals from different sectors have distinct incentives, norms of operation, and even vocabularies (Szanton, 1981). Developing collaborative practices that align those differences takes time, possibly even comparable to the amount of time it takes to complete the intended project.

Enter partnerships. If developing trusting relationships is half of the work, why not leverage those relationships for additional projects? This argument almost feels too obvious. Researchers regularly maintain collaborations spanning many grants or articles. The same logic is even more applicable to cross-sector collaborations because the effort to establish them is so great (Key et al., 2019; Sandy & Holland, 2006). In a world where each question builds toward the next one, insights inspire implementation projects, and funders solicit proposals on short time horizons, established partnerships can nimbly generate new projects with increasing levels of sophistication and impact. Thus, if projects are good, partnerships are better by an order of magnitude.

The distinction between projects and partnerships is well-trodden, but it begs a more novel question: if projects proliferate from partnerships, what makes partnerships proliferate? Our answer to this is ‘community.’ Again, we can see analogs in the research world. Professional organizations like the American Statistical Association, for example, are communities of practice that enable members to share their work, debate results, and chart future research. Most importantly, members become known to each other, collaboratively hatching new projects and giving rise to a ‘field’ with an established identity. Crucially, the organization provides the infrastructure for this collective work.

For cross-sector collaboration, we might envision a civic research community, composed of researchers, policymakers, practitioners, community leaders, and other stakeholders working collectively toward benefits for society. With the right infrastructure, those who are not yet partners might become acquainted with each other through events, publications, and mutual colleagues. As such, a civic research community can establish many new cross-sector partnerships and, in turn, a multitude of projects. Impact is amplified by yet another order of magnitude.

But what does a civic research community look like? It is different from traditional academic communities, which are centered around a single topic area (e.g., statistics). In contrast, the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) is unified by geography, convening all those conducting civic research within and on behalf of Greater Boston. Consequently, this community does not focus on a single topic area but spans the many that face the region, from gentrification and transportation access to digital equity and environmental justice. The question, then, is how do we support such a community to thrive, and, even simpler, recognize itself as a community? Our core tool for doing so has been BARI Conference: Greater Boston’s Annual Insight-to-Impact Summit.

Fostering a Civic Research Community: BARI’s Annual Conference

BARI pursues civically engaged research that advances social, economic, and environmental justice in collaboration with the communities of greater Boston (see www.bostonarearesearchinitiative.net and O’Brien, 2018, for more on the vision and history). Key to this mission is the investment in programming and resources that facilitate researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and community leaders across the region to engage in cross-sector collaborations, especially when rooted in shared “civic research agendas” (Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, 2018). BARI was officially launched in 2011 with a conference hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. That conference, however, did not convene a community so much as it invited prominent speakers to exhort the audience to pursue cross-sector collaborations.

By 2017, we recognized that enough people in Greater Boston were engaged in cross-sector collaborations to constitute a community that might share empirical results as well as insights on the best ways to build partnerships and maximize impact. As such, we hosted our first annual conference modeled on academia’s tradition of crowdsourcing. We released a call for talks, and a cross-sector review committee organized submissions into an agenda. Moderators chaired panels of three to four related projects, capturing the intersections between work occurring in the region. The full agenda then reflected the breadth of civic research in Greater Boston, something no one had previously observed in its entirety.

Fast-forward to 2024. We have hosted eight annual conferences at five venues: Northeastern University (where BARI is based; 2017, 2022), Boston University (2018), the Massachusetts State House (2019), MIT (2023), and Microsoft’s New England Research Development Center (2024; 2020 and 2021 were online webinars). The talk submissions have grown from ~50 to nearly 90, and attendance has increased from ~125 to more than 475 (though the accessibility of the pandemic-era webinars created a peak of 600+ attendees). Keynotes have featured leading academics (e.g., Raj Chetty, Harvard University), a debate between mayoral candidates, a farewell address from a civic leader who influenced Boston over 5 decades (Paul Grogan, The Boston Foundation), and a prominent community leader speaking to how community–university partnerships do and do not provide value to community members (Chaplain Clementina Chéry, Louis D. Brown Peace Institute). (See Figure 1 for logo and scenes from the 2024 conference. Readers interested in diving deeper into this history, including full speaker lists and YouTube videos can visit https://cssh.northeastern.edu/bari/bari-conferences/.) These details verify the existence of a civic research community in Greater Boston and that BARI has successfully convened it, but they gloss over how this community has evolved in the last 7 years.

^{Figure 1. (a) Logo for BARI Conference 2024. (b) Audience at the opening keynote. (c) Presenter and audience at a session on gentrification and neighborhood change. (d) Scene from the closing reception.}

Evolution of the BARI Conference

The full evolution of the BARI Conference is visible through its goals and format. Our initial objective was ‘research-policy’ collaboration, as captured by the title of the 2011 conference, Reimagining the City-University Relationship. Bridging the work of researchers and public officials remains an important goal whose practice is still advancing in municipalities around the world (as evidenced, for example, by the National Science Foundation’s Smart & Connected Communities program). But it is only part of the story. For a civic research community to fully represent its region and serve the people that live there, it needs to engage community voices. In the early years, numerous representatives of community-based organizations attended the conference, but these individuals were the exception, skewing toward those who were most comfortable in spaces built by and for researchers and public officials. The need to go further became especially apparent following the reckonings on equity, justice, and science’s role in society that surfaced during the pandemic.

The conference committee explored various formats when planning the 2022 conference. Importantly, we did not pursue inclusivity for its own sake—we pursued inclusivity in service of the mission of convening the entire civic research community and amplifying its potential for impact. This required a new format that would enable the inclusive conversations we hoped to foster. We replaced panels with workshops. Our invited speakers were almost exclusively public officials and community leaders tasked with challenging the audience to develop questions and ideas that could inspire new partnerships and projects. Some argued, though, that this transformation abandoned the unique forum we had created for members of the civic research community to share their work. As one colleague cautioned, “But for BARI, who is creating that space?” Nonetheless, this experiment expanded the population of people who identified as part of the ‘BARI community.’

Lessons from 2022 helped us craft a more balanced format in 2023, one we replicated in 2024. We returned to the proposal-and-review process for constructing panels, reestablishing the forum that was unique to BARI. But we kept two elements from 2022 to maintain the breadth of the community and conversation. First, sessions were 90 minutes long, allowing extended discussion or workshops to follow the presentations. This acknowledged that everyone in the room was an expert in their own way and that the richest conversation was one that allowed all of them to contribute. Second, we invited ‘provocateurs’ (akin to discussants at academic conferences), who were often from community-based organizations, to challenge the audience to consider how the work could go further. Does it really matter to communities? Do other pressing questions merit our attention? What are the implications for implementation and public engagement? What (if any) role do science and data need to play? These provocateurs grounded the conversation in its civic aspirations. As one provocateur laughed to us at the closing reception in 2024, “I thought you were crazy asking a non-data guy to comment on data presentations. Then I realized that was exactly your plan.”

BARI Conference in Action

Most of what we have described to this point is conceptual—indeed, we are academics, and we see the underlying thought process of the conference as essential to its value and how it might be replicated. That said, this column would be incomplete without accounting for impact. This is not the forum, however, for a formal evaluation replete with a rigorous analysis of attendees and speakers, feedback and testimonials, and long-term tracking of projects and partnerships arising from the conference. Instead, we want to capture the conference and its potential to support and energize the civic research community in action by sharing three panels from the 2023 and 2024 conferences.

• Food Insecurity (2023): The three speakers on this panel adopted completely different methodologies: a traditional policy evaluation of a food access intervention, an approximation of access to fast food establishments through cellphone mobility data, and a public data sculpture on hunger. The moderator was the President & CEO of Project Bread, a local nonprofit dedicated to food access, and the provocateur was the Executive Director of Food Rescue US, a national nonprofit that connects food donors to service agencies. Altogether, the panel provided a panoramic view on the diverse perspectives and methods pertaining to a single topic.

• Environmental Justice: Ensuring Community-Led, Research-Driven Solutions (2024): This panel featured four talks on university–community partnerships for tracking and pursuing environmental justice. Instead of having a single community-based provocateur, each project was co-presented by a university and community representative. This ensured deep insight from both sides of the collaborations, some of which might have even surprised the partners themselves. The moderator then challenged the audience to generate the next round of questions to be answered.

• Reparations Workshop (2024): This lunch workshop was led by members of a cross-institutional research team established by the City of Boston’s Task Force on Reparations; Embrace Boston, which had recently released a report on the need for reparations for Black Americans; and The Emancipator, a nonprofit digital magazine that reimagines the nation’s first abolitionist newspapers for today. Participants attempted to define reparations, the challenges to designing and implementing them, and the research needed to help solve those challenges.

Importantly, each of these three examples has a follow-on anecdote illustrating the long-term power of community. After Project Bread’s executive director moderated in 2023, their entire staff returned in 2024 to present their own research. The environmental justice panel advanced conversations about how these numerous organizations can collectively pursue this shared goal, including the development of a major proposal for federally funded research infrastructure. And the Reparations Research Team, Embrace Boston, and The Emancipator transcribed the workshop notes to inform each of their efforts to advance reparations in Boston. These are just a few examples of partnerships and projects that have grown and emerged thanks to the conference.

Conclusion

The BARI Conference is an example of how a civic research community can be fostered to amplify the partnerships and, in turn, the projects that advance both scholarship and impact in a region. In describing it, we have not only sought to capture the conception of a civic research community but also the intentional design of infrastructure through which that community can thrive. That said, a conference is one of many possible offerings that could serve that goal, and BARI operates in just one of many regions that might strive for said goal.

Regarding other forms of infrastructure, BARI has a variety of offerings that we did not present here. Our Boston Data Portal makes research-quality data describing the people and places of Boston publicly available to users with multiple levels of data literacy. Our research seed grants program has supported graduate student projects at the intersection of research, practice, and policy at seven different universities, leading to new papers, reports, datasets, and books. Our community-based conversations on civic research help nonprofits and public agencies to determine how data can best advance their priorities. And our educational programs and internships for high school students have helped young people envision themselves in the tech sector and the role of data and technology in their communities. But there are many other possibilities that BARI has not built. A community Institutional Review Board (IRB) could ensure that the research done in, on, and with communities benefits those populations. Monthly ‘salons’ discussing key issues can sustain conversations about civic research across the year. A peer review system for public reports would provide public agencies and nonprofits with the feedback that academic researchers often take for granted in the publication process. Each of these supports would enhance the quality and impact of a civic research community.

Meanwhile, one might argue that the BARI Conference has seen such success in Boston because of our unique density of colleges and universities. Consequently, there are many willing academic collaborators and local government, nonprofits, corporations, and philanthropies that have employees and institutional cultures that value and invest in data and research. But others have been moving in the same direction. For example, Toronto established its own annual CivicLab TO Symposium in 2023. Further, a civic research community can still be convened—and might even be easier to coordinate—in cities with fewer institutions of higher education, as in South Bend, Indiana, where then-mayor Pete Buttigieg’s administration established partnerships with the University of Notre Dame. Such opportunities are present in dozens if not hundreds of cities around the world. Some organizations, like the MetroLab Network, are even convening these partnerships internationally, with the hopes of identifying overlapping goals for civic research across cities. With that in mind, we conclude with some thoughts on how other cities (or counties, towns, or otherwise) might engage their own civic research communities.

• Start small. Identify the key players who are enthusiastic about learning and building together. The truth is that getting started can be hard, so working with people and organizations with a shared commitment to civic research makes it easier to find momentum.

• It takes all kinds. Civic research entails multiple forms of expertise: technical skills, theoretical understanding, cultural competency, and insider knowledge of how policy, practice, and daily life unfold in communities. Designing programming for this wide range of experts requires an advising body that reflects the audience you want to engage.

• Let your values guide. Civic research, as suggested by the name, leverages science and technology to advance the society we want to live in, which begs the question: What is the society that we want? Given the vast possibilities, a civic research community needs a set of shared values that can give shape to goals and the pathways for attaining them.

• Learn and evolve together. There is an adage that you cannot improve what you do not track. Evaluating the effectiveness of a conference—or any other form of infrastructure—will include attention not only to the volume of participation (i.e., How many attendees and submissions?) but also to diversity. If certain types of expertise are underrepresented, it is time to return to the other steps listed here: identify those with that expertise who are enthusiastic about civic research, incorporate their voices into new iterations of the programming and resources, and allow that conversation to further enrich your values and the outcomes the community can produce.

Disclosure Statement

Daniel T. O’Brien and Kimberly D. Lucas have no financial or non-financial disclosures to share for this article.

References

Key, K. D., Furr-Holden, D., Lewis, E. Y., Cunningham, R., Zimmerman, M. A., Johnson-Lawrence, V., & Selig, S. (2019). The continuum of community engagement in research: A roadmap for understanding and assessing progress. Progress in Community Health Partnerships: Research, Education, and Action, 13(4), 427–434. https://doi.org/10.1353/cpr.2019.0064

Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. (2018). Civic research agenda: So many questions, so little time. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hSvvuuyqjHQDooj-GqczeLYEyvWwDhnp/view

O’Brien, D. T. (2018). The urban commons: How data and technology can rebuild our cities. Harvard University Press.

Sandy, M., & Holland, B. A. (2006). Different worlds and common ground: Community partner perspectives on campus-community partnerships. Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning, 13, 30–43. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.3239521.0013.103

Szanton, P. (1981). Not well advised. Russell Sage Foundation.

©2024 Daniel T. O’Brien and Kimberly D. Lucas. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) International license, except where otherwise indicated with respect to particular material included in the article.