Glass apparently a little more than half full: initial reflections on survey. The BPF position on the results agenda has been that the glass is half empty, rather than half full.
It’s hard to quibble with the desire to increase effectiveness, or that evidence can be a useful tool to that end. However, from a managerial perspective we were worried that the results agenda could – depending on how it was applied – devolve into mechanistic insistence on meaningless numbers and downward pressure on operations budgets, rather than generating opportunities for informed decisions, learning and adaptation.
From a power-sensitive standpoint, we also thought that the agenda’s insistence on certain forms of knowledge and evidence would reinforce existing power relations, exclude, divide politically and disempower. For those of us committed to transformative development, we feel there are good reasons to worry that the glass is likely not only to be half empty, but cracked and dripping. Among ourselves we have been discussing what these numbers mean: Evergreen Data. The Wrong Kind of White Space Long-ish reports are probably never going away entirely, so let’s make them suitable for a digital reading age.
In the olden days, when we printed reports, they often had extra blank pages at the front and back. It probably gave printed materials a sense of... Adding Confidence Intervals to a Dot Plot Evergreen Data Visualization Academy member Dana McGuire recently wrote me to ask about her dot plot. How to Show Ranking Data in Excel Danielle, a member of my Evergreen Data Visualization Academy, submitted a question to our monthly Office Hours webinar about how to show ranking data. Guest Post: Posters – They’re Not Just for Conferences Anymore! SE Note: I almost never make posters but I know they are a hot reporting tool for many of you, so I asked poster veteran Kylie Hutchinson to share her secrets.
Where to Start and End Your Y-Axis Scale The Y-Axis Debate is one of the most hotly discussed among cool data nerds, like me and my friends. One Free Pie Chart. Evaluspheric Perceptions. Rick on the road blog. Our team has recently begun work on an evaluability assessment of an agency's work in a particular policy area, covering many programs in many countries.
Part of our brief is to examine the evaluability of the programs' Theory of Change (ToC). In order to do this we clearly need to identify some criteria for assessing the evaluability of ToC. I initially identified five which I thought might be appropriate, and then put these out to the members of the MandE NEWS email list for comment. Many comments were quickly forthcoming. In all, a total of 20 people responded in the space of two days (Thanks to Bali, Dwiagus, Denis, Bob, Helene, Mustapha, Justine, Claude, Alex, Alatunji, Isabel, Sven, Irene, Francis, Erik, Dinesh, Rebecca, John, Rajan and Nick). Caveats and clarifications The word "evaluable" needs some clarification.
We also need to distinguish between an evaluable ToC and a “good” ToC. This brings us to a third clarification. . · Understandable · Verifiable · Testable · Explained.