Interactive online guide for municipalities and their partners to prevent online incitement of violence.

Open Research objectives/practices

• Making the outputs of research freely available.
• Using alternative models of publication and peer review.

Introduction

Based on two research reports (published open-access), we developed an open[1]access, interactive online guide that can be used freely by municipalities and their partners (i.e., youth work, police) to help prevent online incitement of violence. This interactive guide provides practitioners with tools to intervene in three stages of online incitement: During peace time, actual crisis, and aftercare. Users can select a stage and find a list of actionable tips and requirements for intervention based on the two research reports, in accessible language.

Motivation

Although the phenomenon of social media (nor its relation to violence in the public domain) are not exactly new anymore, online work within and collaboration between municipalities, youth workers, and the police have only recently started to develop from quite scattered pioneering efforts. Focus groups with these target groups revealed their need for a centralized place that gathers tips and prerequisites for prevention and intervention in online incited violence. They emphasized that existing research reports from various perspectives are not typically very accessible, both because of pay walls as well as their wordiness and use of academic language.

Moreover, practical knowledge is fragmented across various institutions and individuals, but an easily accessible and coherent overview was lacking. The goal of this online guide was therefore to gather relevant insights and make them easily accessible for practical use through an interactive interface. The co-creation aspects of developing this tool through focus groups with municipalities, youth workers, and employees in particular facilitated the development of a valuable interactive tool for practice use.

The information from our interactive guide is also included in the barrier model "Online-Incited Public Disturbances" from the Dutch Centre for Crime Prevention and Safety (Centrum voor Criminaliteitspreventie en Veiligheid). This barrier model is intended to reduce and, if possible, prevent the adverse effects of online-incited public disturbances for municipalities.

Lessons learned

Through the co-creation of this product with practice partners, we learned to translate general scientific insights into concrete, actionable tips and prerequisites that can be applied directly in practice. In our scientific output, we often tend to use generic and abstract language even in the practical implications section – for example, that municipalities and their partners should ensure a safe atmosphere to share information among themselves. In the current project, the practice partners forced us to make this more concrete by asking ‘How?’ over and over, which ultimately led to a much more accessible and valuable end product. This experience made me more aware of the gap between our scientific output and the practice fields that could actually use it; open access is not just about removal of the pay wall for articles but we also need to think more consciously about language and other barriers that may remain.

Another lesson I learned is that unfortunately our university website is not currently suited for open sharing of such online interactive interfaces, which forced me to distribute an Adobe link instead of embedding the online interactive guide on a UG web page. I am sure these options will improve in the very near future, fitting the current rapid developments towards various alternative modes of translating scientific knowledge and insights into actionable products for practice.

URLs, references and further information

• Open-access interactive online guide for municipalities and partners: https://indd.adobe.com/view/66ba1996- 31b0-4142-bbe5-163dfc9b996d
• Open-access report 1 (literature review): https://hdl.handle.net/11370/b1f12537- 66eb-4b47-b1c5-e4d55d7d0536
• Open-access report 2 (practice part): https://hdl.handle.net/11370/3346144b[1]92e54788-a0c1-e23a401d4823