aes23 Meanjin - Day 2 Reflections

Continuing the theme of Lifeview that Maggie Walter Kicked off on day 1, Donna Mertens implored us to examine our world views in evaluation. She pushed us to be conscious that transformational change is needed. She believes evaluation can play a role in creating a more just world and advocates for transformative evaluation. To do this we need to unpack the structural underpinnings of inequality. We need to look into the intersectionality of class, gender, race disability. So the need for evaluation/evaluators to get upstream of the problem is an echoing theme in this conference.

Next, I went to a session with Uncle Doyen Radcliffe and Aimee Bacchetto on their seed-to-tree framework. I love this framework, so simple and adaptable. Doyen shared how it was used in the community by marking progress visually with stones, and engaging in wide-ranging conversations.

Two of our own, Anna Strempel and Mutsumi Karasaki , ran a fantastic session on novel approaches to the 'discovery phase' of building a Theory of Change - the often overlooked first step where you strive to deeply understand the problem and opportunities. We cover some of this in our new course, Advanced Theory of Change which launches in a couple of weeks.

Then I went to a run of sessions on Digital and AI. I learned lots from Gerard Atkinson MBA QPR GAICD , who shared his experiment of comparing different approaches for text analysis, comparing humans with Chat GPT and more. I was gripped. Main points: you get what you paid for and human coding still adds a lot. After this, our own Data and Insights Lead Ethel Karskens led a fascinating session about how to manage biases and risks associated with digital adoption.

I had to make hard choices about what to attend and this is only a snapshot of what was on.