Inspiration
Today, quantitative efforts to understand the information environment almost all rely on one or more of the following:
- Bespoke or short-term data collection isolated within an institution;
- Platform-provided data via dashboards, researcher APIs, or downloadable data sets (all of which are brittle and can be unreliable); or
- Commercial social listening services with opaque data collection and inclusion criteria and limited platform coverage.
The Accelerator is an international consortium with diverse partners on four continents working to more effectively understand the information environment.
Mission
The Accelerator’s mission is to build shared tools that radically improve the speed and quality of research on the increasingly noisy, complex, and consequential information environment.
Accelerator tools will enable researchers to efficiently access and analyze data, save time and resources currently spent on duplicative engineering work, and support processes that enable the field as a whole but are too expensive and time-consuming for any one research team.
With high-quality and timely research in hand, decision-makers will be more likely to implement changes based on vetted scientific evidence, as we expect them to do in other areas such as in health and economics. Together, we can address the legal, organizational, and technical challenges that have so far impeded research and evidence-based decision-making on the information environment.
Our place in the community:
Throughout scoping the Accelerator we have benefited from extensive consultations across the community of scholars who share the common objective of enabling evidence-based policymaking on the information environment. The Accelerator will support existing and developing efforts while fulfilling a unique need.
Values
At the Accelerator, global collaboration, and a commitment to transparency, nonpartisanship, and continuous improvement guides our work.
Global collaboration
We believe that collaboration is the best way to create sustainable solutions to complex challenges. Through global partnerships we harness broad collective expertise, resources, and perspectives to achieve maximum impact. Our approach to collaboration is rooted in transparency, open communication, and mutual respect.
Transparency
There can be no real trust without transparency and trust is essential when studying something as sensitive as the information environment. We are committed to sharing our ethical requirements; where and why we shift our approach; working in partnership with a wide group of stakeholders to ensure no single point of view dominates the direction of the work; and to answering the questions of our broader community with openness and candor.
Nonpartisanship
The Accelerator’s work is outside the scope of partisan politics. While the content of the information environment is often political, the tools we need to better understand it are not. Our role is to ensure that the research community can efficiently and effectively study the information environment, and, through that process, to help policymakers and their constituents globally better understand how to navigate the complex commons we all share.
Continuous improvement
We commit to keeping pace with the rapidly changing information environment, approaching our work with agility so that we consistently improve the tools and resources we develop. We will continually seek new ideas and test new approaches to ensure our work enables meaningful change through a culture of curiosity, adaptability, and experimentation.