The UK Evaluation Society conference will be held this year on 10 & 11 May in London. Always a great opportunity to network and share insights, the theme of this year’s event is particularly relevant: the use and usability of Evaluation. More details here.
Here in Ireland, progress is slowly being made in terms of building evaluation capacity across the public service. The next part of the puzzle is building the capacity to consume evaluation work and extract the most benefit. Otherwise too much of our work is wasted.
In fairness sometimes much of the responsibility for the limited usability of evaluation can be squarely directed at ourselves as evaluators. Far too often we seem to write our reports to ourselves, rather than to users and commissioners. Thankfully things are changing and the gulf between the 140-pages report and the 140-character tweet is gradually being bridged!
A conference closer to home and one where I’m sure many of us will meet is the IGEES annual conference on 8 June. A showcase of the work of the economists of the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service, rather than a collection of presentations around a common theme or challenge, this is nonetheless a good opportunity for government evaluators to come together and share. As the IGEES matures, we will hopefully see greater breadth of methodologies (rather than just methods!) presented as well as some more thought about usability and consumption of evaluative work. Call for papers is till April 21, more info here.
And finally the motherlode of evaluation conferences: Evaluation 2017 in Washington DC from 6-11 November. The theme this year is ‘From learning into Action‘ and the conference will explore how we can learn from evaluation to create better practices and outcomes. The list of attendees and presenters is like a who’s who of evaluation and it would be really great if anyone fortunate enough to attend from Ireland could share learning with the rest of us! More info here. Hashtag is #Eval17.