Evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement - a practical workshop

Evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement - a practical workshop to help you understand and improve the impact of your work

With growing demand for transparency, accountability and citizen participation in policy making and service provision, citizen engagement is becoming increasingly important. Citizen engagement means engagement between citizens and governments, donors and the private sector bodies that deliver government services. Increased use of technology brings both opportunities and challenges to citizen engagement processes, including opportunities for collecting, analyzing and evaluating data about those processes.

This participatory and practical one-day workshop will look at the effective evaluation of such Digital Citizen Engagement (DCE) initiatives. The workshop is based on the recent completion by Aptivate (http://www.aptivate.org), IDS (http://www.ids.ac.uk/) and ICA-UK (http://www.ica-uk.org.uk/) of The Guide to Evaluating Digital Citizen Engagement (http://www.aptivate.org/dce) for the World Bank. This will be published Autumn 2015 and is a useful resource for anyone involved in designing, planning or evaluating DCE programmes or activities. The field evaluations conducted in the creation of the guide (in Brazil, Uganda, Kenya and Cameroon) will also be featured in a book ( Civic Tech in the Global South) due to be published at the end of 2015.

The workshop will provide an overview of practical steps, both to assess the extent to which digital tools have contributed to citizen engagement, and to help understand the impact introducing technology has had on the engagement processes. We will look at these issues through a number of lenses, each of which will explored in turn:
• Objective: Is the program objective reasonable and appropriate, and to what extent do the activities meet these objectives? Is the rationale reasonable and appropriate?
• Control: Which actors own, control and influence the digital engagement process?
• Participation: Who participates and how?
• Technology: How effective and appropriate is the choice of technology and how well was it implemented?
• Effects: What effects does DCE have on processes and outcomes?

In order to have maximum impact and get the most out of the workshop, we are inviting participation by people and organisations that are actively engaged in the planning, implementation or evaluation of a DCE initiative.

Participants (1-2 per organisation) are encouraged to bring a one page outline of the DCE project that they are working on. We will structure practical elements of the workshop around participants projects. Having real projects to work with will therefore be important.

Please RSVP to express interest NOW. Attendance will be confirmed nearer the date.