Appreciative Inquiryfor evaluation and

community development

Rhona Sharpe

Patsy Clarke

Users and Innovation Programme Meeting 30 January 2009

A: Membership of the community

So it was a bit like an imposter syndrome. I mean ‘what are we doing here?’ .. You know I’m not really a JISC person.

It’s useful to feel part of a community that isn’t specific to my institution.

Perhaps what I’ve found most useful is not the intended outcome – a JISC funded project – but the community itself and the opportunity to use it as a sandpit for new ideas.

…excited from the beginning about the diverse backgrounds of members and their willingness to talk and share ideas.

There’s no single community, there’s the hippies and the rockers.. They are only a single community because they happened to be geographically quite close. It does mean that you get some great moments when you move from place to place.

In a JISC project you (normally) just get on with it yourself. But now your project is one of a number of projects and you find yourself in conversation online with people about the project and how it can impact on us and vice versa.

I think it was around the time of the Manchester event that I realised we were building a community rather than joining one.

finding points of contact with those they might not have expected to have common ground

1. Multiple perspectives

2. Metaphors

Liquid learning space

A swam

pChaos

Buzzing busy swarm (stingless)

Great Auntie Gladys

A snail watching

the whizzing

community

Orchestra…/Rock star…/Rock festival…

3. Imagery

4. Multiple data collection

Varied purposeful activities at each stage:– AI workshops– In depth interviews– Story collecting and sharing– Digital postcards – Metaphors of Emerge– Images of the future of Emerge– Including AI questions in surveys– Spark sheets– Text wall

5. Reactive data collection

A short fill in form to collect information on the  Web 2.0 tools and applications you have used  

either directly in the project or as part of the management of your project:

http://tinyurl.com/web2form

6. Iterative, participative

In summary

Our evaluation approach

has taken us through the 4 D cycle, towards DESTINY (sustaining what will be)

values the sharing of multiple perspectives

encourages the use of metaphors and images

involves multiple data collection

and participation in making sense of the finding and constructing recommendations

…....