Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, Kuopio, Finland.
Kisakallio Sports Institute, Lohja, Finland.
Health Res Policy Syst. 2020 Apr 3;18(1):36. doi: 10.1186/s12961-020-00547-3.
Evidence-informed decision-making and better use of scientific information in societal decisions has been an area of development for decades but is still topical. Decision support work can be viewed from the perspective of information collection, synthesis and flow between decision-makers, experts and stakeholders. Open policy practice is a coherent set of methods for such work. It has been developed and utilised mostly in Finnish and European contexts.
An overview of open policy practice is given, and theoretical and practical properties are evaluated based on properties of good policy support. The evaluation is based on information from several assessments and research projects developing and applying open policy practice and the authors' practical experiences. The methods are evaluated against their capability of producing quality of content, applicability and efficiency in policy support as well as how well they support close interaction among participants and understanding of each other's views.
The evaluation revealed that methods and online tools work as expected, as demonstrated by the assessments and policy support processes conducted. The approach improves the availability of information and especially of relevant details. Experts are ambivalent about the acceptability of openness - it is an important scientific principle, but it goes against many current research and decision-making practices. However, co-creation and openness are megatrends that are changing science, decision-making and the society at large. Against many experts' fears, open participation has not caused problems in performing high-quality assessments. On the contrary, a key challenge is to motivate and help more experts, decision-makers and citizens to participate and share their views. Many methods within open policy practice have also been widely used in other contexts.
Open policy practice proved to be a useful and coherent set of methods. It guided policy processes toward a more collaborative approach, whose purpose was wider understanding rather than winning a debate. There is potential for merging open policy practice with other open science and open decision process tools. Active facilitation, community building and improving the user-friendliness of the tools were identified as key solutions for improving the usability of the method in the future.
几十年来，循证决策和在社会决策中更好地利用科学信息一直是一个发展领域，但仍然是一个热门话题。决策支持工作可以从信息收集、决策者、专家和利益相关者之间的信息综合和流动的角度来看待。开放政策实践是一套用于此类工作的连贯方法。它主要在芬兰和欧洲背景下开发和使用。
概述了开放政策实践，并根据良好政策支持的属性评估了其理论和实践属性。评估基于开发和应用开放政策实践的若干评估和研究项目的信息以及作者的实践经验。评估是根据它们在政策支持中产生内容质量、适用性和效率的能力以及它们在参与者之间的密切互动和相互理解方面的支持程度来进行的。
评估结果表明，方法和在线工具的运行情况符合预期，这一点在进行的评估和政策支持过程中得到了证明。该方法提高了信息的可用性，特别是相关细节的可用性。专家对开放性的可接受性持矛盾态度——它是一个重要的科学原则，但它违背了当前许多研究和决策实践。然而，共同创造和开放性是正在改变科学、决策和整个社会的大趋势。与许多专家的担忧相反，开放参与并没有在进行高质量评估方面造成问题。相反，一个关键挑战是激励和帮助更多的专家、决策者和公民参与并分享他们的观点。开放政策实践中的许多方法也已在其他背景下广泛使用。
开放政策实践被证明是一套有用且连贯的方法。它引导政策过程朝着更具协作性的方法发展，其目的是更广泛的理解，而不是赢得一场辩论。将开放政策实践与其他开放科学和开放决策过程工具结合使用具有潜力。积极的促进、社区建设和提高工具的用户友好性被确定为提高该方法未来可用性的关键解决方案。
