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