Sona Ayvazyan, Deputy Director of Transparency International Anti-corruption Center participated in "Policy Research, Technology, and Advocacy Converge @ the HUB" interactive workshop in Prague, held between 7-8 of November 2013, organized by the Think Tank Fund with Open Society Fund Prague and Google. The event brought together think tankers, business representatives, data journalists, etc. to explore strategy and management, learning and evaluation, lifecycles of data products and to share the lessons learned from innovative projects.

The overall aim of the event was to contextualize the use of new technologies and approaches within each organizations overall efforts, including their overall advocacy and communications strategies. As each step of the policy cycle requires different tools or approaches in order to achieve advocacy and communications goals, it is important that this work be integrated into the organizations strategy, without becoming an aim in itself.

Expected outcomes of the event were:

1. Increased capacity and confidence for think tanks and NGOs with in-house policy research functions in using data for advocacy aims;

2. Increased cooperation among organizations working on similar advocacy topics;

3. Increased use of measurement tools and methods for choosing effective data-based approaches;

4. Increased efficiency of advocacy and communications.