handing over the baton…
We are celebrating the election of David Drabble as a member of the UK Evaluation Society Council – UKES. David takes up a place being vacated by Dr Dione Hills, who resigned from the Council after 10 years at the end of 2018. Dione remains actively involved in the work of the Society, particularly in its Volunteer Evaluator Peer Review (VEPR) professional support and programme of training activities.
UKES has recently been going through a revamp – redesigning its website, undertaking a review of how best to provide value to its members and updating some of its resources, such as the Guidelines for Good Practice in Evaluation and the Framework of Evaluation Capabilities.
The Tavistock Institute has been active in the work of UKES since Elliot Stern took up his role as founding President in 1994. Since that time, at least one, and often several, members of the Tavistock evaluation and research team have held positions on its council, and have been active in the London and South East Network, currently convened by Giorgia Iacopini.
The Society aims to promote and improve the theory, practice, understanding and utilisation of evaluation across the UK. But it also plays an important role in supporting the development and work of evaluation societies and associations across the world.
Dione has recently been invited to give a keynote speech at the Norwegian Evaluation Society in Oslo this September, building on the theme of a popular recent CECAN Webinar: How to evaluate or commission an evaluation when everything is messy.
The UK Evaluation Society’s annual conference and the journal Evaluation, published by Sage in association with the Institute, are two of the main arenas in which evaluation practitioners and commissioners of evaluation can exchange and talk about the latest ideas about evaluation theory and practice.
The theme of this year’s conference was Evaluation: A Diverse Field and a number of speeches and presentations highlighted the pressing challenge of evaluating complex interventions. Georgie Parry-Crooke gave a session on Bringing out the best in times of uncertainty while David Drabble presented on The role of data visualisation in evaluation. The slides from which can be seen below:
Registration is now also open for the UKES London and South East Network’s event “Contribution Analysis -approach and practice”. Further details about this can be found here.
