Conference – building for the future: evaluation in governance, development & progress

The European Evaluation Society has it’s biennial conference (full title above) scheduled for 1-3 October 2008 in Lisbon, Portugal. The conference kicks off with a series of hands-on workshops, that I attended at the last conference and found very useful. Read more on the conference website.

I’ll be presenting a paper at the conference on “Evaluating Public Information and Advocacy Campaigns”, so if you are going, please drop me a line…

Glenn

Social network analysis and evaluation

Measuring networks can have many applications: how influence works, how change happens within a community, how people meet, etc. I’m interested in measuring networks as indicator of how contacts are established amongst people, particularly in events and conferences, as I’ve written about previously.

In this area, there is a new resource page available on social network analysis and evaluation from M&E news. The page contains many useful resources and examples of network analysis and evaluation for non-profit organisations, education, events and research and development – including one from myself.

(Above image is from a network analysis of a conference, further information is available here>> )

Glenn

media evaluation – sentiment analysis

Monitoring of the media often involves assessing the “tone” of a media item – is it positive, negative or neutral on a given subject? This is often done manually and many of the large media monitoring services do this but it is a paid service not readily available to many.

Now there is a tool available to all to assess the “tone” of a media item (written):

Sentiment analyser>>

This is what David Phillips of the LeverWealth blog had to say about it:

“This kind of development is useful for analysing sentiment of news articles, blogs and other content, which is its primary purpose but it also has applications in evaluating style and and bias all of which are very useful to the PR industry, regulators and watchers of political sentinemt on and off line.”

Try it out here>>

Glenn

Cultural issues in evaluation

Having spent the last week in the Congo – mostly in Kisangani (pictured above) for an evaluation project, I’ve been thinking about cultural issues and evaluation – in particular how evaluators are perceived in different societies as I’ve written about before.

Interestingly, when I was recently in Central Asia, it was explained to me that evaluation in the Soviet tradition was traditionally seen as an inspection-like function which would search for small mistakes for which people could then be punished for (demotion or worse..).

In Africa, the perception is quite different. People see you as coming to listen, investigate and relay what you have found. Those working with NGOs are now familiar with evaluation.

Of course, cultural issues and how you are percieved can affect your evaluation. I don’t believe there are any quick learning points except to understand as much as you can about the cultural you are working in – and to test your evaluation methodology and questions by discussing with local people prior to any gathering of data.

This article (pdf) has some interesting points on evaluating across cultures, for example, explaining local relevance and usefulness of the evaluation and to be careful in the use of questionnaire types (such as the Likert scale) which may be misunderstood in some contexts.

Glenn