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Iran says it's ready to negotiate on its contentious nuclear program, but questions abound over Tehran's domestic politics and what confidence-building measures the West and Iran can agree upon.

If the international community can agree on but a few core policies, there is the best chance in years to foster peace in Somalia.

We are Veronica Smith and Chris Metzner. Veronica is principal of data2insight, an evaluation and research firm with data visualization expertise and Chris Metzner is a freelance graphic designer.

Matt Keene and Chris created the popular fuzzy logic model for the Oregon Paint Stewardship Pilot Program. The fuzzy logic model concept (FLM) evolved out of the desire to make the traditional logic model dynamic, non-linear and stakeholder-friendly. This logic model embraces fluid and approximate reasoning and provides an evaluation reporting framework.

We provide tips, tricks and resources for illustrating and disseminating your FLM.

Illustration

Rad Resources: Creating a FLM begins with a sketch of the theory of action and theory of change (get out your pencil and paper!). Once finalized, it’s time to digitize. For DIY’ers, we recommend OmniGraffle 5 Professional ($199.99), Adobe Illustrator CS5 ($599.00) or DoView ($79.95).

OmniGraffle offers quick page-layout design and is great for Mac users. DoView turns outcome models into user-friendly web pages. Adobe Illustrator is the graphic design industry standard. It allows total control over the project and is a complex tool.

Hot Tip: Hiring a graphic designer can cost can anywhere from $60-100/hour. You save time when the designer translates your sketch into an illustration tailored to stakeholders’ needs using sound visual design principles.  The illustration for the Oregon paint program (above) would cost somewhere between $2000-3500.

Dissemination

Rad Resources: With a digital illustration you are ready to get online. First, purchase a domain name ($12.99/yr) and hosting plan ($6.99/yr). We recommend DreamHost or Hostmonster.

If your FLM doesn’t require advanced user interaction, purchase a pre-built website from the hosting company. WordPress, free software installed by your host company is another option. WordPress offers easy blog creation and site-enhancing plugins, but requires basic web development knowledge. Apply a theme to give your website for a professional look. Using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 ($399.00) is for someone with advanced website coding knowledge.

Hot Tip: You can also hire a designer to bring the FLM to life. A web designer will charge $100-150/hour. Meet with the designer and communicate your goals in order to get a cost estimate for website creation. A designer can create a site for as little as $1000. The value add of a good designer is the expertise to secure the website, monitor traffic and optimize content for search engines. Website design costs can be offset by time and money saved disseminating results electronically.

Beyond the basics

Cool Trick: Employ social media and video technologies to increase stakeholder engagement and evaluation use.

Run with it

FLM opens the door for enhanced stakeholder engagement, reporting, results dissemination and evidence-based decision making. Let us know how you use FLMs to meet your client needs.

We’re celebrating Data Visualization and Reporting Week with our colleagues in the DVR AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our DVR members and you may wish to consider subscribing to our weekly headlines and resources list where we’ll be highlighting DVR resources. 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.

Related posts:

1. Sally Honeycutt on Developing Logic Models
2. DVR Week: Stuart Henderson on Using SmartDraw for Concept and Data Visualization
3. DOVP Week: Aimee Sickels on the Two Minute Logic Model

Why More Nonprofits Are Getting Bigger 2012 02 22 Peter Kim Jeffrey L. Bradach A recent Bridgespan Group study found that the number of US nonprofits with annual revenues of more than $50 million has increased dramatically over the

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave these remarks on 'jobs diplomacy' on February 21, 2012 in Washington DC, at the Global Business Conference.

Timor-Leste’s upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections will be an important step in consolidating the relative stability the country has enjoyed since recovering from the 2006 crisis, but a number of security risks deserve continued attention.

La dernière réunion entre les dirigeants chypriotes grecs et turcs et le secrétaire général des Nations unies du 22 au 24 janvier a échoué mettant en question le future de l'île et de la Turquie comme candidat à l'Union européenne. C'était la cinquième fois depuis novembre 2010 que les dirigeants se rencontraient. Mais dès le début de la discussion à la Greentree Foundation à New York, les deux camps ont reconnu, au grand dam des Nations unies, qu'aucun progrès tangible n'a été accompli depuis le sommet d'octobre dernier. Aucun des sept points de négociation n'a été résolu.

لا يثير فشل آخر قمة جمعت قادة طائفتي قبرص مع الأمين العام للأمم المتحدة في أواخر شهر كانون الثاني/ يناير الماضي، التساؤلات حول مصير الجزيرة فحسب، وإنما أيضاً حول مصير عضوية تركيا في الاتحاد الأوروبي. وتعد آخر جولة من المحادثات الخامسة منذ تشرين الثاني/ نوفمبر 2010. بيد أنّه حالما بدأت المحادثات في مؤسسة «غرين تري» في نيويورك، اعترف كلا الجانبين بأنّه لم يتم احراز أي تقدم ملموس منذ قمة شهر تشرين الاول/ أكتوبر الماضي، إذ لم يُتوصل إلى اتفاق بشأن أي من نقاط التفاوض السبع، مما أحبط آمال المنظمة العالمية.

Los atentados terroristas ocurridos en varias zonas del país durante las últimas semanas están alimentando, en muchos, la percepción de que “al gobierno se le están yendo las cosas de las manos”. Teniendo en cuenta el número de acciones armadas de parte de las FARC, enero fue el mes más violento desde el 2004.

I’m Johanna Morariu, a Director at Innovation Network, an evaluation consulting firm that works with nonprofit organizations and foundations.

Rad Resources: I want to share two extremely useful network analysis and mapping tools: Gephi and NodeXL. I use NodeXL for collecting, organizing, and analyzing network data and Gephi for attractively presenting sociograms or network maps.

In a past post, Shelly Engelman and Tom McKlin introduced NodeXL when they wrote about assessing the evolution of Social Networks Using NodeXL. In addition to the functionality they discussed, NodeXL can also be used to collect social network data from Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and email, and NodeXL can open/read other network analysis file formats. (And with the recently released Social Network Importer, you can also work with Facebook social networks.) But for all its strengths and utility, the network maps that can be made in NodeXL leave something to be desired.

Lessons Learned: Visually observing network structural features is a critical component of network analysis. And for evaluation stakeholders to effectively discern features, it is important to create well-designed network maps—and that is exactly what Gephi does!

Gephi allows for unprecedented control and options while creating network maps. For example, groups of network nodes can be coded by color, or degree can be represented by increasing node size. Gephi also has the capacity to incorporate longitudinal data, to show changes over time.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, here is the progression from NodeXL to Gephi drawn from a twitter search of the hashtag #eval on January 17, 2011.

First, the basic NodeXL map:

After exporting the data from NodeXL to a GraphML file, uploading to Gephi, and tweaking, here is the new map:

And with another simple change (turning on automatic resizing by node degree), voilà!

Rad Resources: And since this is the DVRTIG week, I can’t help but share three other essential tools for creating visually appealing presentations:

• Design Seeds for color palette inspiration.
• Instant Eyedropper to get RGB values (for example, from a Design Seeds color palette) to use in visualizations.
• Color Oracle to simulate color blindness to ensure visualization and design retain their meaning for every viewer.

Rad Resources: Interested in learning more about network analysis? Check out these great posts:

• Maryann Durland on Network Analysis and Measurements and Sociograms in Social Network Analysis – Why Both Are Important
• Oliwier Dziadkowiec and Trish Peaster on Using Social Network Analysis in Evaluation

We’re celebrating Data Visualization and Reporting Week with our colleagues in the DVR AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our DVR members and you may wish to consider subscribing to our weekly headlines and resources list where we’ll be highlighting DVR resources. 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.

Related posts:

1. EdEval Week: Shelly Engelman and Tom McKlin on assessing the evolution of Social Networks Using NodeXL
2. SNA TIG Week: Todd Honeycutt on Missing Data in Social Network Analysis
3. Oliwier Dziadkowiec and Trish Peaster on Using Social Network Analysis in Evaluation

Oh, hi. I’m Stephanie Evergreen and I’m in love with data visualization and reporting (DVR). I blog about DVR, I tweet about DVR, and sometimes I even dream about DVR. I was in love with DVR at first sight so I’m here to tell you what you can do when you realize you, too, have got it bad.

Lessons Learned:

The signs you’re in love:

• You see children playing and think about how you can use their jacket colors for your next report cover.
• You wake up in a panicked sweat over whether the last graph you made had a 2:1 width:height ratio.
• You feel butterflies in your stomach when you think of cute presentation titles.

Hot tips: Now what can you do with all that attractive energy?

• Hook up with your local Toastmasters or Ignite club. In both of these groups, members give short presentations, usually on fun and lighthearted topics. It’s a great way to get inspired by just watching others, test out ideas, shore up your presentation skills, and feel the love from fellow diehards.
• Write up a style sheet for one of your projects. These one-pagers specify the precise fonts, headers, margins, and colors to be used for all documentation in one project. Smashing Magazine has a detailed guide on what to include. Establishing these settings upfront can ensure a consistent look and feel for the communications around your evaluation and let you release some of that built up DVR tension.
• Enjoy a little restraint. One of the most common guidelines in data visualization and reporting is to keep it simple. Test out Chart Tamer or download free templates from the Chart Chooser at Juice Analytics. Both of these awesome tools ask the user to begin by thinking about the relationship between the variables that should be graphed. After the relationship has been selected, the programs restrict the chart options to only those appropriate for displaying variables of that nature.
• Reach out. Join the Data Visualization and Reporting Topical Interest Group by adjusting your profile on eval.org. Ask or answer a question about data visualization on Nathan Yau’s FlowingData Forum or Stephen Few’s Perceptual Edge Discussion Page. Comment in Susan Kistler’s discussion on LinkedIn. Or tap into the collective and rapidly growing knowledge base already in our field and read one of the many blog posts from fellow evaluators on data visualization and reporting. When you’ve got it bad for DVR, at least you’ll know you’re not alone.

 

We’re celebrating Data Visualization and Reporting Week with our colleagues in the DVR AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our DVR members and you may wish to consider subscribing to our weekly headlines and resources list where we’ll be highlighting DVR resources. 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.

 

Related posts:

1. DVR Week: Stephanie Evergreen on the Data Visualization and Reporting TIG
2. Susan Kistler on Suggesting Data Visualizations to Win a Copy of Evaluation Strategies for Communicating and Reporting
3. DVR Week: Amy Germuth and Johanna Morariu on Kicking off the DVR TIG Week

Our names are Amy Germuth and Johanna Morariu and we are proud to serve as the Chair and Co-Chair of the Data Visualization and Reporting TIG. Although this TIG started just last year we already have multiple members working to entice the AEA community to better communicate using infographics and data visualizations. We hope you will join us in considering how graphic representations of data and visual communication can improve stakeholder engagement, understanding, and support at all levels of an evaluation.

Hot Tip: From Inspired Magazine: 20 Essential Infographic and Data Visualization Blogs.  While some are merely eye candy, others are the real deal and show data in new and meaningful ways.

Rad Resource: Did you know that the DVRTIG website is chock full of links to powerful, amazing visualization tools and resources? The TIG resources area of the website contains helpful information such as upcoming DVRTIG sponsored Coffee Break Webinars, blogs, visualization tools, and examples.

Rad Resource: Don’t forget to search the AEA Library for DVRTIG resources!

Hot Tip: Find your cool!  If what we presented intrigues you, consider joining the TIG. AEA members can select to join up to 5 TIGs. To join DVRTIG, login to www.eval.org. Then, under the Members Only tab, select Update My Profile. In your profile, you simply check the box next to our TIG’s name. That’s it! You’re a member!

The DVRTIG was started because it is increasingly clear that evaluators will have to be more creative in our communications if we want our findings to be heard and used. Our goal is to bring together a network of like-minded evaluators who can support each other—and the broader AEA community—in such efforts. This week of DVRTIG blogging on aea365 is one such effort.  Please be on the lookout for more from us throughout the year, including information about the second ever Ignite AEA (which also serves as our business meeting), to be held at this year’s conference (Minneapolis, MN, October 22-27, 2012).

We’re celebrating Data Visualization and Reporting Week with our colleagues in the DVR AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our DVR members and you may wish to consider subscribing to our weekly headlines and resources list where we’ll be highlighting DVR resources. 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.

Related posts:

1. DVR Week: Stephanie Evergreen on the Data Visualization and Reporting TIG
2. DVR Week: John Nash on Tips for Submitting Proposals to the DVR TIG
3. DVR Week: Amy Germuth on Using Visual Design Principles

I’m Susan Kistler, the American Evaluation Association’s Executive Director. Once each year I write explicitly to those of you who are not AEA members in hopes of encouraging you to join the association.

Hot Tip – Join AEA: Membership in AEA is only $80 per year, $60 if your primary membership is with the Canadian Evaluation Society, or $30 if you are a full-time student. It quickly pays for itself. You can join online.

Hot Tip – AEA members have access to four of the leading evaluation journals: As a member, you’ll receive hardcopy and electronic subscriptions to AEA’s own journals, The American Journal of Evaluation and New Directions for Evaluation, as well as electronic access to Evaluation Review and Evaluation and the Health Professions. You’ll receive not only the latest articles, but also access to 20+ years of archival content.

Hot Tip – AEA members can attend over 40 free Coffee Break Demonstrations each year: And, members can access the recordings in the members-only Coffee Break Archive. Want to get a taste for them? Check out the list of upcoming CBDs as well as the public list of those that are already in the archives.

Hot Tip – AEA members receive discounts on professional development (online and in person): Full members receive $50 off each one-day workshop, whether offered as an AEA eStudy (David Fetterman is offering Empowerment Evaluation this week; Tom Chapel is offering Intro to Evaluation, and Michelle Kobayashi is offering Survey Development next month) or in-person at the AEA annual conference, where you’ll find over 50 pre- and post-conference workshops.

Hot Tip – AEA members engage with the field’s thought leaders: For one week each month AEA hosts a leader in the field on its members-only Thought Leaders Forum. The discussant shares insights, explores issues, and answers your questions. You can lurk in the background and take it all in, or dive in and discuss. Next up? Gail Barrington in March.

Hot Tip – AEA members promote their business: Whether you are an independent consultant or part of a 100 person firm, AEA membership gives you a free listing of your evaluation-related services in AEA’s Find-an-Evaluator database. Directly accessible from the homepage, the FAE listings are among the most highly used sections of the AEA website.

Hot Tip – AEA members build their professional networks and get questions answered: AEA membership includes membership in up to five of AEA’s 50+ Topical Interest Groups (TIGs), from Data Visualization and Reporting, to Multiethnic Issues in Evaluation, to Independent Consulting, to Quantitative Methods, to Evaluating the Arts and Culture, there is a TIG or two (or five) for everyone.

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.

Related posts:

1. OPEG Affiliate Week: Tucker Handley on Payment Cost and Type for Affiliate Membership and Conference Attendance
2. OPEG Affiliate Week: Sheri Chaney Jones on Steps to Strengthen Affiliate Membership
3. Susan Kistler on Joining AEA

My name is Rafael Monterde-Diaz, and I am an Associate Professor at Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain), where I teach Project Management and Program Evaluation. I blog at EVALUATECA and you can also find me on twitter: @rafa_monty

Rad Resource – EVALUATECA is a blog devoted to evaluation. I try to share events and resources mainly focused on evaluation, but from time to time I also bring tools and approaches from other areas to push collective thinking and innovation in evaluation issues. The blog is entirely written in Spanish. Most of the entries are mainly related (but not exclusively) to International issues and Development Aid.

Clipped from: evaluateca.wordpress.com (share this clip)

Hot Tips – favorite posts:

• Mapeo de actores (Actors’ mapping): One of the most visited posts ever. It’s clear that practitioners need useful tools
• Evaluado la libertad (Valuing Freedom): My first comment (2007) about Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Approach and its potential as an evaluation approach.
• Hagamos la excepción de romper las reglas (Let’s make the exception of breaking the rules): After an evaluation in Ecuador, some reflections about my limitations to express in a report the real change in people’s lives.
• Será por métodos (They will be methods): A humble contribution for measuring vulnerability and resilience in rural development interventions using a multicriteria approach.
• Estándares para el desarrollo de capacidades en evaluación (Evaluation Capacity Development Standards): It’s only a brief comment about the ECDG (Evaluation Capacity Development Group) support for an ISO International Workshop Agreement, but it generated a fresh and passionate discussion in the Spanish speaker’s evaluation community.

Lessons Learned – why I blog: I started blogging in 2007, when Evaluation was barely present in Internet social networks. I found a big gap in the Spanish speaker’s evaluation community, at that time one could hardly find Web 2.0 sites for discussion and sharing. After four years, I think we still have a low level of exchange in both directions. There are very interesting experiences in the Spanish speaking world that remain unknown in other regions of the world and they could become a very useful input. But I think we also miss discussions that take place at an international level because the information is not in Spanish. EVALUATECA helped me to understand the global dimension of the language of blogs and social networks: they are a privileged way to bring ideas across different cultures.

Lessons Learned: I believe it is important to combine blogging with other networking tools, mixing everything into a daily routine. While mailing lists or forums allow more in-depth discussions, social networks such as Twitter or Facebook help you to find fresh cost-effective information. But be careful! It is very easy to get overloaded and end up paralyzed.

This winter, we’re running a 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.

Related posts:

1. CPE Week: Liliana Rodriguez-Campos on Collaborative Evaluation
2. Elizabeth Harris on A Measure of Youth Resiliency
3. Carlo Amillo on Resources for Impact Evaluators

Guest Post: What “The Wire” Has to Teach Us about Nonprofit Performance Measurement

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney writes that "the character of the Chinese government--one that marries aspects of the free market with suppression of freedom--shouldn't become the norm."

Despite years of investment in community policing, the Indonesian police remain deeply distrusted by the people they are supposed to serve.

Full report(PDF)
Questionnaire with Findings (PDF)

With President Obama presenting his proposed budget for 2013, the question of how to deal with the Bush-era tax cuts, scheduled to terminate at the end of 2012, is once again on the table.

(Image Credit: David Reber)

The Program for Public Consultation presented a representative sample of Americans with options for dealing with the tax cuts, including--for each option--a description of the budgetary consequences and two strongly-stated arguments in its favor.

In conclusion, seven in ten (71%) favored extending the cuts for income below $250,000. This included 22% who favored extending the cuts for all income levels, as well as 49% who favored limiting the extension to income below $250,000.

A similar margin (73%) favored terminating the cuts for income over $250,000. This included 24% who favored terminating them for all income levels, as well as the 49% who favored terminating them only for income above $250,000.

These positions were relatively consistent regardless of party affiliation. Extending cuts for household income below $250,000 was supported by 74% of Republicans, 65% of Democrats, and 76% of independents. Letting cuts expire for higher incomes was supported by 65% of Republicans, 83% of Democrats, and 67% of independents.

Interestingly, only a third of Republicans (33%) endorsed the position of making the tax cuts permanent at all levels. Among Republicans, having the cuts expire only for high incomes was the most common answer (39%). About as many Republicans (24%) as Democrats (28%) favored having the tax cuts simply expire for all income levels.

The study was conducted by the Program for Public Consultation, a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland. "Public consultation" seeks to reveal how the public responds when it hears the kind of information and arguments that policymakers hear when making decisions, thus eliciting a clearer expression of the public's values.

Respondents were also given the opportunity to modify the income threshold for terminating the tax cuts. The $250,000 level proved to be the most popular.

All respondents were asked to choose from three levels--$150,000, $250,000 and $500,000. The $250,000 threshold was the most common answer, with 43% choosing it. A greater number put the threshold to the lower level of $150,000 (28%) than put it at the higher level of $500,000 (23%), though not by a large margin.

There were significant partisan differences. A relatively large 39% of Republicans favored the higher threshold of $500,000, though a majority favored $250,000 or less. A relatively large number of independents (41%) and Democrats (32%) favored the lower threshold of $150,000, but in both cases a majority favored $250,000 or more.

Respondents were also presented, and asked to evaluate, two arguments in favor of each proposal. Almost all arguments were found persuasive by majorities, and by majorities of both parties. "In the public, most people see some validity in a range of different arguments," commented Clay Ramsay, research director. "The fact that people in the study found many arguments persuasive shows they were really deliberating and pondering tradeoffs."

For the most popular position--ending tax cuts only for incomes above $250,000--the strongest argument was based on concerns about reducing demand and hurting the economic recovery: "People with low to middle incomes shouldn't be hit with a tax increase in an economic downturn. If they suddenly have less, this will reduce demand...but this isn't true of the 1-2% with household incomes above $250,000--they aren't going to change their spending because of a tax increase that represents only a small percentage of their overall income." This was found convincing by 73%, including 71% of Republicans, 77% of Democrats, and 69% of independents.

The poll was fielded from December 3 to 9, 2011 with a sample size of 680 respondents. Thus, with a design effect of 1.6431, the margin of error was 4.8%. Please contact PPC if you would like a detailed sample design.

The poll was conducted using the web-enabled KnowledgePanel®, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. Initially, participants are chosen scientifically by a random selection of telephone numbers and residential addresses. Persons in selected households are then invited by telephone or by mail to participate in the web-enabled KnowledgePanel®. For those who agree to participate, but do not already have Internet access, Knowledge Networks provides a laptop and ISP connection. More technical information is available at http://www.knowledgenetworks.com/ganp/reviewer-info.html.

I’m Steve Gill, a long-time, independent consultant living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I’ve been a mental health therapist, community mental health worker, university professor, program evaluator, small business owner, employee training and development specialist, strategic planner, and management/leadership consultant.

Rad Resource – The Performance Improvement Blog: This is my blog. I post once a week about topics related to increasing learning and effectiveness of leaders and managers in all types of organizations. Often these posts are about evaluation and its application to organizational performance improvement.

Hot Tips – favorite posts: Over the past four years, I have written over 345 posts to my blog. Here are five that I think exemplify my writing about evaluation:

• 06/13/11 – The Learning Alliance and Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation: Kirkpatrick’s four levels of training evaluation have made an important contribution to the field of workplace learning, but the model is inadequate in explaining the causal link between learning and bottom-line outcomes.
• 06/08/11 – Evaluating Training Through Stories: Evaluation of training programs should describe how a learning intervention contributes to business results. This can’t be done with surveys; it can only be done by telling stories.
• 07/20/10 – Seeing the Gorilla in Program Evaluation: Evaluators need to be open to unexpected behaviors and events as demonstrated in a video by Simons and Chabris.
• 02/08/10 – What Gets Measured Gets Done…or Not: Simply because something is measured does not necessarily mean it will be improved. It takes not only measurement, but also the will to change.
• 07/31/09 – Measure Success or Measure Failure?: I believe we learn more from successes than from failures. As evaluators we should put our emphasis on telling success stories.

Lessons Learned – why I blog: I blog to learn and to facilitate the learning of others. In order to blog, I must stay current on what’s happening in my areas of interest and what’s happening in current events, as well as reflect on what I’m learning from my own consulting practice. I find it very rewarding to engage others in conversations about these reflections and observations. In addition, my blog is like a personal, professional library.  When I’m investigating a topic, I start by searching my own blog.

Lessons Learned: The blogosphere is frequented by many people who would rather read anonymously and not engage in public conversation (i.e., post comments). My blog has some regulars who often post comments, but there are many more who read my posts and never comment…and that’s okay.

This winter, we’re running a 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.

Related posts:

1. Bloggers Series: Amy Germuth on EvalThoughts
2. Sharon Jones-Viera on Finding the aea365 Archive
3. Farah Smith-Bron on AEA’s Topical Interest Groups

As Kenya advances into southern Somalia, it must act cautiously and avoid prolonged “occupation”, lest it turn local opinion against the operation and galvanise opposition Al-Shabaab can co-opt, much as happened to Ethiopia in 2006-2009.