[Wikimedia-l] Tomorrow: Office hour inside out (program evaluation)

[Frank Schulenburg]

Hi folks,

Tomorrow at 17:00 UTC, I will be holding an office hour about program
evaluation on #wikimedia-office. The target audience for this office
hour will be chapter representatives and volunteers who are currently
running (or planning to run) programs and programmatic activities.
You'll find some background information about why program evaluation
might be worth talking about in my most recent blog post on the
Foundation's blog:

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/01/lets-start-talking-about-program-evaluation/

As we all know, most office hours follow a certain rule: there's one
poor staffer who is getting grilled by the people on the IRC channel –
people ask a variety of questions and the staff person tries to answer
every question in a limited amount of time. It's a lot of fun (I
guess, at least for the people who're asking the questions) and it has
been a good way of direct communication between WMF employees and the
community.

Now, this office hour will be different. Not that I don't enjoy being
grilled for one hour :-) I've done IRC office hours several times
before and I always enjoyed answering questions. The reason for this
office hour to be different is that I want to _listen to you in the
first place_. I would like to learn more about

* _your_ thoughts about why evaluation might be important
* _your_ experiences with making evaluation a part of program design
* _your_ hopes and fears when it comes to increasingly evaluating
programs and programmatic activities in the future
* _your_ ideas and feedback on evaluation practices

Ideally, we would have some people in the room tomorrow who have done
some kind evaluation in the past or who are planning to embark on
evaluation work in the near future. With that said – if you have no
idea about what program evaluation is and you'd like to learn more
about it, you're invited as well! Or maybe you're just curious to see
if this "office hour inside out" is going to play out well ;-)

I'm looking forward to meeting you tomorrow at 17:00 UTC,

Frank