Register with ECOBROKER to see full details of the Research Ideas that have been submitted by local authorities and other participants in the network and to add your profile to the Participant Directory to promote your expertise and interests. If you have any suggestions on what should be added to the website or changed please email the ECOBROKER administrator. ECOBROKER is what people want it to be and what seems like a good idea to people.

Are you a practitioner (e.g. local authority professional)?

  • Familiarize yourself with the ECOBROKER language
  • Post your research ideas to our Research Ideas portal and find academic partners. The terms and conditions of the collaboration will be agreed at the beginning of the project between the proponent and the researcher. The terms and conditions of the collaboration are outside the remit of ECOBROKER. In order to find out how to post a research idea to ECOBROKER read the ECOBROKER manual at: Getting started on ECOBROKER.
  • Look at current research collaborations to see the range of projects that can be initiated through ECOBROKER.
  • Find relevant expertise in our Participant Directory or by browsing the Research Ideas

Are you a researcher or student?

  • Familiarize yourself with the ECOBROKER language
  • Browse ECOBROKER Research Ideas until you find something that interests you. These research ideas should be used for initiating a research collaboration with the proponent
  • Contact the proponent of the research idea to find out more about the project including the terms of the collaboration. It is important that the research ideas are not simply taken and developed independently, but that the proponent of the idea is at least informed of any research activity that may have been started by the proposed idea.
  • Collaborate with the practitioner on a research project. The terms and conditions of the collaboration will be agreed at the beginning of the project between the proponent and the researcher. The terms and conditions of the collaboration are outside the remit of ECOBROKER.
  • The research is carried out in collaboration between the proponent and the researcher. Once the collaboration is initiated it is notified by emailing the administrator of ECOBROKER. 
  • Post a summary of results and outputs of the project on the ECOBROKER site
  • Promote your interests and expertise to potential local authority partners (or other ECOBROKER participants) on our Participant Directory or by suggesting a Research idea. For further information on how to use ECOBROKER to post research ideas consult the ECOBROKER manual at: Getting started on ECOBROKER.

Frequently asked questions:

How advanced does a research idea have to be for posting on ECOBROKER?

ECOBROKER has no policy on this, but my personal preference would be that ideas are published as early as possible. As a matter of fact, I have the vision that ECOBROKER research ideas (and resulting projects) could serve as a kind of ‘research formulation phase’, where practitioners and researchers can collaboratively formulate questions more precisely, either for preparation of a research proposal, or for formulation of a research tender that could then go out to consultancies. From an academic’s point of view student projects (which I imagine would be the main vehicle by which research ideas on ECOBROKER would be addressed in a first instance) can assist in this process by providing either preliminary data and/or a review of the scientific literature. I also would hope that if somebody ‘feels’ like there is a knowledge gap in a sector/ area that they are not familiar with, that they would post this as a research idea, so that people who actually know about it, can react and say what they think about it (e.g. if something is already known, they can flag it, or if the question is not formulated well they can collaborate on formulating it better). (Tamara Hochstrasser, ECOBROKER co-ordinator).