Public Lab Wiki documentation



Evaluation

This is a revision from February 16, 2011 02:12. View all revisions
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On this page we are in the process of summarizing and formulating our approach towards self-evaluation; as a community with strong principles, where we engage in open participation and advocacy in our partner communities, this process is not that of a typical researcher/participant nature. Rather, we seek to formulate an evaluative approach that takes into account:

  • multiple audiences - feedback for local communities, for ourselves, for institutions looking to adopt our data, for funding agencies, etc
  • reflexivity - we may work with local partners to formulate an evaluative strategy, and this may often include questionnaires, surveys, interviews which we take part in both as subjects and as investigators
  • outreach - by publishing evaluations in a variety of formats, we may employ diverse tactics to better understand and refine our work; its publication in diverse venues (journals, newspapers, white papers, video, public presentation, etc) offers us an opportunity to reach out to various fields (ecology, law, social science, technology, aid)
  • location - our evaluations should be situated in geographic communities, examining the effects of our tools and data production in collaboration with a specific group of residents

Goals

Good evaluative approaches could enable us to:

  • quantify our data and present it to scientific, government agencies for use in research, legal, and
  • provide rich feedback for field mappers (in the case of balloon mapping and other public scientists to improve their techniques
  • assess the effects of our work on local communities and situations of environmental (and other types of) conflict
  • involve local partners in the quantification and interpretation of our joint work
  • ...

... to be continued