The Office of the Privacy Commissioner is pleased to announce the launch of the Contributions Program 2012-13. The Contributions Program, which has funded nearly 80 privacy initiatives over the past eight years, presents a unique opportunity to advance privacy knowledge by drawing on the valuable skills and capacities of academic and not-for-profit organizations in Canada.
This year, the OPC is looking for innovative research projects which will generate and translate knowledge to the greater public. Our Office is interested in a variety of research topics, which feed into the OPC’s priority areas: Identity Integrity and Privacy; Information Technology and Privacy; Public Safety and Privacy; and Genetic Information and Privacy.
We fund research because we want to learn more about privacy issues in Canada but we also want to help ensure that others benefit from this research. So, we are particularly interested in seeing proposals from researchers and organizations that include a plan for knowledge translation. Knowledge translation is a process by which theoretical research results get transformed into useable outcomes that end-users can apply in practice. Some examples of knowledge translation activities that may be included in eligible proposals include:
- Workshops, conferences and symposia that disseminate research results to relevant stakeholders and provide an opportunity for knowledge exchange between theoretical concepts and practical realities;
- Engagement of relevant end-users as active participants in an iterative process throughout the research project to obtain relevant feedback and enhance the validity and utility of research results;
- Innovative and interactive online approaches for disseminating research findings and raising public awareness of privacy issues;
- Survey, evaluation or other methods of assessing the relevance, effectiveness or impact of knowledge dissemination approaches and strategies aimed at raising privacy awareness and understanding among individuals or organizations; and
- Initiatives that transform research results into useable knowledge for relevant intermediaries (such as parents, teachers, journalists or consumer / industry / professional associations, etc.), who could then further disseminate that knowledge to relevant end-users.
For more details regarding the OPC Contributions Program please refer to the Contributions Program web page.