Evaluation

As more of us, practitioners, work more and more within companies, organisations or in projects that are funded, there is a higher need to know something about evaluation. Meaning a kind of evaluation that is in sync with the worldview and the methodologies that we use ourselves. Below you will find some documents and links to websites. Please add yours and share with us how you used it.

There are also some documents here: the topic of research on AoH trainings.

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Permalink Reply by Ria Baeck on January 2, 2011 at 8:38am

Here is a list that was compiled by the crew of Sera Tompson and Tim Merry (Spring '10):

- Participatory Action Research/Learning models for evaluation:

This link (from '98) connects practices like Open Space to their historical/theoretical roots in PAR (Participatory Action Research), where systems have long been seen to be living, nonlinear, dynamic, complex---and evaluative processes have been well integrated into process design.

- The Learning History approach scaled up, may be of use:

http://ccs.mit.edu/LH/21cwp002.html

http://www.learninghistories.net/

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/Insight/viewContentItem.do;jsessionid=B2B488AD5F37A5596863429DCED3F627?contentType=Article&contentId=1602610

- Tamarack site focuses on evaluation:

Jamie Gamble is a leader in this area in Canada. Jamie has worked with Michael Quinn Patton, a leader in the field who is about to publish a new book on evaluation in emergent, complex systems. (is now out already!) He calls his approach "utilization-focused evaluation" which I think just means that it's evaluation that's actually useful! That is, it contributes to everyone's learning. And it's evaluation that is embedded in the whole process rather than being an after-thought, or pretending to be objective. This approach is also called developmental evaluation, and Jamie wrote this primer.

(More documents on Developmental Evaluation in Chris Corrigan's blog.)

- Agile: a way for action learning teams to set goals and measure progress together.

- Most Significant Change (MSC)

- Performance Story Reporting - this framework incorporates participatory evaluation and MSC along with a facilitated design of evaluation summits/workshops. I (Sera) worked with Jess on a community sustainability project called Castlemaine 500 and the report is worth a look at as it describes the approach taken to a 2 year project. You can download the report here.