This paper has its origins in a casual remark by one of the participants at a British Educational Research Association colloquium on Education Policy and Research held at the University of Edinburgh in November 2002. Given that the event brought together a significant number of well- respected players in education research and policy from across the UK, the comment in the title might seem surprising. However, on closer consideration it can seem important in two ways: First, it raises the intriguing question - who are the right people and how do they generate and gain currency for their ideas? Is there a difference in the way they go about policy activities as compared to how, for example, those attending that colloquium would ordinarily do? If, as Whitty (2001) has argued, we are witnessing an increasingly evident shift away from conventional techniques of co- ordination and control on the part of large-scale bureaucratic state forms and their replacement by more evaluative agencies and discourses, how do these present in relation to policy agenda-setting and policy formation? Might attention to emergence and social capital theory help explain this new activism? And might this connect to what it is to be a right person?Secondly, the comment offers valuable insight into the frustratingly hit-and- miss nature of researching to influence public policy. Education research is usually seen to concern "producing valid knowledge about teaching, learning and the institutional frameworks in which they occur" (Hillage et al., 1998): as such much of what we do is bound up with a particularly interpretative conceptualisation of the research act. There is no guarantee however that validity will result in currency within the policy process. Indeed, the disconnection of policy from research is a staple of debate in this area. So also is the question of the long standing 'schism' (Gorard 2002) between nominally qualitative and quantitative modes of research activity. And even when research does enter the policy cycle, there is little evidence that its use is in any way consistent (Furlong and White 2001). Education research is not alone in this: policy research in other areas of the social and human sciences is equally challenged by this conundrum. Could it be that our assumptions about the worth of 'traditional' policy research in the policy processes are in some sense flawed? And that what increasingly is valued in policy brokerage has less to do with the product and process of education policy research but is more directly linked up with people and their ideas? Or more specifically with the right people and their ideas?Certain characteristics of the speaker marked them off from most others at the colloquium - particularly, a sophisticated sense of the affordances of networks of influence and the nature of new policy activism. It seemed reasonable to begin looking for answers there. This paper attempts to draw together some of the early outcomes of that search. It proposes that the ability to influence public policy in general and education policy in particular needs to be reset within an understanding of identity and agency in emerging 'wired' communities of policy practitioners; it considers how 'social capital' - in the sense advanced by Bourdieu and latterly by Putnam - and 'creative capital' (Florida 2002) may provide policy currency in an increasingly networked world; and it reflects on how a new public life may be starting to emerge in which the role of public policy research is in tension between what McPherson & Raab (1988) have described as pluralist and corporatist projects. We might do well at this point to look to developments in social theory and political theory more thoroughly to understand the scale of challenge this tension presents.