Farah Smith-Bron on AEA’s Topical Interest Groups

I’m Farah Smith-Bron and I’m learning more about the American Evaluation Association’s Topical Interest Groups. Did you know that AEA has over 40 Topical Interest Groups (TIGs)? These are subgroups of the association (each AEA member can join up to five) that create smaller communities within the larger association.

Lesson Learned: TIG stands for Topical Interest Group and when people say it out loud, it rhymes with ‘pig’. Gotta get the lingo straight.

Lesson Learned: While you need to be a member of AEA to join a TIG, anyone can access a TIG’s website and many of the resources there. Not all of the TIGs have websites, but most are developing them.

Rad Resource: You can find the full list of TIGs at http://www.eval.org/aboutus/organization/tigs.asp and those with websites have a link that says “TIG Website” directly under their name on the left-hand column.

Lesson Learned: The TIGs also serve as categories or tags in at least two places:

  1. For posts on aea365: Look in the right column on the aea365 website. There, you’ll find the list of TIGs and the posts tagged as related to each TIG. You can see how many posts are related to each by the number that appears under the TIG name. Currently the TIGs with the most posts tagged for them are Collaborative, Participatory, and Empowerment with 89 related posts; and Integrating Technology Into Evaluation with 61 related posts.
  2. For items uploaded to the AEA eLibrary: On the left column, select “Search Library” and then you may need to select “Search for Specific Tags/Keywords” to bring up a list of all of the TIGs. Click on the check boxes next to the TIGs of interest to you and click search at the bottom to find items in the library tagged for a particular TIG.

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.

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