This year's CESBC conference theme encourages us to collaboratively evolve our evaluation practice through the following three streams:
1. Emerging Trends in Evaluation:
Exploring Together to Improve Our Work
We are seeing trends and innovations in evaluation from new tools and technology to new areas of evaluation focus. We invite you to share your experience with one or both of the following areas:
a) Technology and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Evaluation
Technology and AI are being used in many ways in the field of evaluation from supporting literature reviews and data analysis, to automating project management tasks.
- How have you utilized (or plan to utilize) new technology and/or AI tools in your evaluation work? What successes and challenges can you share from your experience?
- What are some of the cautions and ethical considerations to account for with using new technology and AI? And how have you explored and addressed these in your work?
- What questions do you have about using new technology and AI to support evaluation?
b) Environmental Sustainability
There is discussion within the evaluation community about the opportunities to embed environmental sustainability into our work, across many different sectors and types of evaluations.
- Given the CES core professional values, what is the role of evaluators in addressing environmental sustainability through evaluations? And what does environmental sustainability look like from an evaluation perspective?
- How have you embedded (or plan to embed) environmental sustainability into your evaluation work?
- What questions do you have about the intersection of evaluation and environmental sustainability, and to address environmental sustainability in your evaluation practice?
2. Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Access (IDEA):
Building Our Skills and Integrating Learnings Into Practice
At the 2022 and 2023 CESBC conferences, we explored and reflected on empowering people and organizations to grow their evaluation capacity, breaking down evaluation access barriers, and encouraging diverse and creative collaborative and participatory evaluation approaches.
Continuing on this learning journey, we invite you to share stories about how you are integrating inclusion, diversity, equity, and access (IDEA) practices into your work.
- What IDEA strategies, methods, or frameworks have you integrated in your evaluation work?
- How are you breaking down evaluation access barriers and contributing to a more diverse evaluation community?
- Given the CES core professional values, what is the role of evaluators in advocating for IDEA and in addressing systemic barriers that hinder IDEA?
- What questions or discussions do you want to bring forward to your fellow evaluators around IDEA?
3. Evaluation Coffee Talk and Story Exchange:
Sharing Stories From Our Work
We invite you to share stories from your evaluation work.
- New and emerging evaluators: Based on your experience so far, what insights do you want to share? What perspectives are you excited to bring to the field of evaluation? What barriers or challenges have you faced entering the evaluation field? How can the evaluation community best support new and emerging evaluators to enable a diverse and sustainable community of practice?
- Experienced evaluators: What evaluation wins and successes are you keen to share with others? What can you share about the impact of your evaluation work? What evaluation failures would you like to share and what have you learned from them? What challenging evaluation questions do you want to brainstorm with a diverse group of evaluators?
- Community organizations and evaluation users: How has evaluation impacted your work? What do you want to share about how evaluation can further support your work? What evaluation challenges have you faced, and how can evaluators better support you or organizations in general?
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