Evaluating Evaluation and Fielding Questions: Field-design and Evaluation Session

Evaluating Evaluation and Fielding Questions: Field-design and Evaluation Session

From our perspective, the MIT Center (and all the other Knight groups) are strongly focused on developing new tools for civic engagement, learning and action in communities. So we want to use a barcamp session to ask a few questions:

* What is a community? * How does community centered iterative development work? * How do you evaluate the success of new civic media tools within communities? * What is a successful civic media tool?

This session is about trying to come up with answers to these questions (or better questions!). Me, Matt Hockenberry and Karen Brennan will examine a range of methods for engaging with communities, examine some case studies from within the Center of iterative design and development and talk about methods for testing and evaluation. We encourage everyone attending to share their research experience or research designs. The session will be more of a discussion grounded in these questions. Sara and Matt will kick off the discussion with a couple of case-studies from the center. We will be developing a wiki/google doc of issues, examples and resources generated by the discussion.

Matt will discuss: Case Study on Sourcemap-a platform for supply chain visualization. He will also discuss user testing and HCI From a Pseudo Psychological Perspective (Technological Intervention or Design Intervention).

Sara will discuss: ExtrAct--a set of web-based tools for communities impacted by extractive industries. She will focus on designing open-source tools that can be sustained by non techie communities. She will provide examples from fieldtesting and development of the ExtrAct tools. She is interest in hearing about strategies for community centered evaluation.

People who have expressed interest in the session:

* Dante Chinni : Patchwork Nation * Ory Okolloh : Ushahidi * Mayur Patel : Director of Strategic Assessment and Impact for Knight * Dayna Cunningham : CoLab media team * Alexa Mills : CoLab media team * Libby McDonald : CoLab media team * Malia Lazu : CoLab media team

Urls for Source-Map discussion:

Urls for ExtrAct: http://www.landmanreportcard.com/

http://www.drillwell.us/news

http://frac.media.mit.edu/wiki/Main/Welcome