Hi. I’m Victor Kuo, one of AEA’s Board Directors and liaison to the International Listening Project (ILP). AEA has launched the ILP to consider strategies that will guide AEA into enhanced engagement with the international communities of evaluators, evaluation organizations and clients of evaluation in the coming years.
The Board sees this initiative as aligned with AEA’s mission and values, specifically reflecting AEA’s commitment to valuing a global and international evaluation community and understanding of evaluation practices. AEA is now positioned to engage more actively in the international arena, but we want our activities to be guided by our membership and forged in collaboration with our international partners. The Listening Project, coordinated by Jim Rugh, is intended to help us listen well to the ideas for international evaluation initiatives of our members as well as our colleagues around the globe.
Hot Tip – Make your voice heard: You may have already received an invitation to participate in the ILP, but if you have not, and you are interested in AEA’s presence in the international arena, I would like to invite you to contribute in any of the following three ways:
- The primary instrument for soliciting individual input is an online questionnaire accessible at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/574552/AEA-International-Listening-Survey. We invite you to go there now and submit your suggestions. We estimate that it should not take more than 15 minutes of your time.
- Another modality for sharing is an interactive blog where multiple persons can offer their suggestions and comment on the suggestions of others. After you respond to the SurveyGizmo questionnaire we invite you to go to http://aea-internationallistening.wikispaces.com/Invitation+to+participate where you can join the discussions on that blog.
- Another mode would be to send your personal comments directly to Jim via e-mail: JimRugh@mindspring.com.
Note that you need not be an AEA member to participate, and we hope to have this first round of data collection completed by August 1. The synthesis process will be shared on the Wikispaces blog.
A report summarizing the findings of the ILP will be circulated by mid-October. Also, there will be a Think Tank Session in Anaheim on Wednesday, November 2, where participants will be invited to contribute to discussions on ways to follow up those findings.
Thank you in advance for your ideas and participation!
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.