In the Open
We make evidence travel — and we work in the open.
Who we are
People's Evidence Lab is a small research and consulting group focused on how evidence travels — or fails to travel — into practice and policy. Our concern is not only whether evidence is rigorous at the point it is generated, but whether it stays understandable, traceable, and useful when it reaches the setting where action is required — whether the reader is a clinician, a patient, a teacher, a policymaker, or an AI-mediated interface acting on someone's behalf.
Why we publish
Useful knowledge should be shared. Public work is how a research group earns trust — not by claiming competence, but by demonstrating it in ways anyone can examine. Much of what we learn is a public good, and we publish it as one: to advance the field, to invite scrutiny, and to be a dependable partner to the communities we serve.
What we contribute openly
Clearer, more equitable content.
How the way information is expressed affects whether people can understand and act on it — and how to make patient- and learner-facing content more comprehensible, more trusted, and more likely to support good decisions.
Provenance and trust that travel with evidence.
Open-standards work on how the context, source, method history, and limitations of an output can be carried with it. We participate in the W3C AI Knowledge Representation Community Group and draw on PROV-O and Verifiable Credentials.
Understanding the reliability of AI-mediated outputs.
How the outputs of large language models vary, and how to tell when they are consistent and safe enough to rely on in real decision settings. Our scoping review of empathy variance is openly registered.
Writing and thinking in public.
Essays and posts that bring a distinctive perspective to long-standing, high-impact problems — sharing both the insight and the reasoning behind it.
How we work
We work in learning mode and in the open. When we make a claim, we show our reasoning, so readers can weigh it for themselves rather than take it on assertion. We value attribution and expect it — giving credit for the work we build on, and seeing our own contributions credited when others build on them. We're glad to collaborate where it advances shared goals.
The normal boundary
Like any research and consulting group, PEL maintains proprietary analytical methods. What we share publicly are our findings, our reasoning, and our outputs; the internal methods we use to produce them remain our own. Clients receive outputs and deliverables, and we hold the confidentiality of our internal work and theirs. We see no tension between this and working in the open — the openness is in the contribution and the reasoning, which is exactly where it is most useful to others.