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Good News: We have bad news! by Ariel Fiszbein

As an evaluator there is often a lot of pressure to find, and subsequently present, positive results.  In his post, Good News: We have bad news!, World Bank Chief Economist Ariel Fiszbein discusses why merely focusing on the positive is not the best approach.  It’s a nice short read, check it out.

Changes coming…

I’ve been working on some fairly major changes to Eval Central.  I’m changing hosting options which will enable some new features that I think you will enjoy.  Of course, the time I have been spending working on updating the site has taken away my ability to post regularly.

Thanks for your patience, I’ll fill you in more as the new site starts to come together.  Expect to see the new look sometime in the next month.

-Chris

Links to celebrate the newly approved AEA Data Visualization and Reporting Topical Interest Group

If you are an American Evaluation Association member you will soon be able to join the new Data Visualization and Reporting Topical Interest Group.  Stephanie Evergreen (@evalu8r), who can be credited as the driving force behind the group’s creation, is the interim president.  More information will be coming out soon directly from AEA, but I thought what better way to celebrate than with some relevant links from the eval community.

Amy Germuth shares her thoughts in a new post:  Evaluation: Death by Powerpoint

Now for a tweet from @EverydayInquiry (Evan Perlman) “All #eval people should be able to visualize their info well. See @datapointed for ideas! Site looks great, I’ll be poring over it later.” The site can be found here (http://www.datapointed.net/).

Lastly, here is a post from my personal blog. The big difference between David McCandless and Hans Rosling

Insights on Foundation Evaluation by Summer Jackson

The two key takeaways from this AEA session should not come to a surprise to evaluators.  But as we all know, they are challenging to implement and sustain:

·         Evaluation should be shared throughout the organization

·         Create shared values around evaluation

Defining Web Savvy

So what does it mean to be web savvy?

I have seen it defined as having experience with specific applications (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) or general knowledge of things like blogs, social networks, or search engines.  But I don’t think these definitions really capture the concept.

The web is constantly changing and growing.  Some of the big things of today will be gone in a year while others will come out of nowhere to become permanent fixtures in our lives.  The rise of Facebook is a recent phenomenon while MySpace has become an afterthought.

In order to be web savvy you have to be flexible.  With an ever-changing landscape of tools the people who thrive are the ones that understand what they use tomorrow may be nothing like the tools they use today.

Web savvy is not about what you know.   It is what you have the potential to know.  It’s about clicking links, testing new tools, and being open to try something completely different.

The bottom line, web savvy is about not being afraid of the web.  There will always be more that you do not know, and that’s OK.  Just don’t let it stop you from trying something new.

Links: Answers to Nothing, This Tract, and Me

In this post, Charles Gasper, a.k.a. The Evaluation Evangelist, provides some evaluation thoughts inspired by donation solicitations: Answers to Nothing

This Tract is a neat Census tool that will become all the more useful once the new Census data is released.  It quickly gives you tract level data visualized.  Discovered via Flowing Data.

Finally, I was interviewed as part of Evidence Soup’s Interview Wednesday series.  You can check it out here: Interview Wednesday: Chris Lysy, research analyst and evidence enthusiast.