Bloggers Week: Daniel Catala-Perez on Comprehensive Evaluation

Call me Daniel. “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world”. (Herman Melville, 1851)

Rad Resource – Comprehensive Evaluation. A site where to find various information and resources on evaluation, public policy and evaluating public policies. Despite the limited time that I have, I started posting in October 2014 with the intention to include a post once a week, at least.

Hot Tips — Favorite posts: Comprehensive Evaluation is bilingual, it is written in Spanish and English. I have only a few posts, but here are those I think are most interesting. Also, I will include links to certain sections of the blog that I believe may be of interest to you.

• Evidence, Evaluation, and Effective Government (by Caroline Heider). Interesting opinion piece by Caroline Heider, Director General of the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank Group, originally published in The Diplomatic Courier.
• ENGAGE: Open Government Data. ENGAGE is a door for researchers that leads them to the world of Open Government Data. By using the ENGAGE platform, researchers and citizens will be able to submit, acquire, search and visualize diverse, distributed and derived Public sector datasets from all the countries of the European Union.
• Authors. Links to relevant information on authors and researchers.
• Training. Links to undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in design, management, analysis and evaluation of public policies around the world.

Lessons Learned — Why I blog: Comprehensive Evaluation is the result of my investigation for the preparation of my degree in Public Administration and Management Final Project, “The evaluation of public policies in Valencian Region: situation analysis and proposal of institutionalization”: many materials collected, pages visited or consulted sources. These data and information will be gradually incorporated into the web. I hope, someone might find it useful.

Lessons Learned — What I’ve learned: In addition to managing Comprehensive Evaluation, I have another personal blog. I am studying a master and also working at the Polytechnic University of Valencia so, I do not have much time for posting in my two blogs but I try never to forget … Post is an escape, a way to get away from daily routine and show the rest of the world who you are, what interests you, what worries you, what you can offer and someone may be interested in receiving… It is also a great way to make friends, if not … what would I do here? Thank you very much!!

This winter, we’re continuing our occasional series highlighting evaluators who blog. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.