Evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement
Listers Happy Easter. This publication may be of interest to some of you. A regular complaint among practitioners and academics alike is that we do not really know how effective technology interventions have actually been. All too often high quality monitoring and evaluation are ignored, underfunded, or left as an afterthought. Moreover, even when it takes place, the design of evaluation activities often means that they are more expressions of wishful thinking, rather than rigorous reviews of why different elements of a program might have been successful or not. Three particular problems are pertinent with evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement: first, actually identifying the extent to which it is the technology, rather than anything else, that has had the impact; second, the use of generalised ‘official’ statistics, be they from governments or operators, which may not sufficiently differentiate between ownership of a device, and actual usage thereof; and third, getting the balance right between expected and unexpected outcomes. Digital engagement need not always be a positive outcome! Professor Tim Unwin https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/23752/deef-book.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
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Grace Githaiga