Movement Strategy/Recommendations/Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt

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Direct links to each recommendation: 1. Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement 2. Improve User Experience 3. Provide for Safety and Inclusion 4. Ensure Equity in Decision-making 5. Coordinate Across Stakeholders 6. Invest in Skills and Leadership Development 7. Manage Internal Knowledge 8. Identify Topics for Impact 9. Innovate in Free Knowledge 10. Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt

Evaluate, Iterate, and Adapt

What

A brief video recording about this recommendation

We will evaluate, monitor, analyze, and learn from our activities as a global Movement. This will improve our self-awareness and inform the improvement and development of what we do. Learning and evaluation should occur at and across all levels, to verify whether our work is making progress toward achieving our strategy. Processes will be based on the principles of participatory evaluation and will be adapted to the capacities of different communities (e.g., not time-consuming, easy to implement, supported by resources).

We will evaluate areas relevant to these recommendations, including equity, diversity, inclusion of newcomers, distribution of resources, content growth and coverage, identifying impactful topics, community health, equitable governance, skills development, partnerships, infrastructure scalability and sustainability, technology efficiency, quality assurance, bug fixing, and platform usability and accessibility. Results will be widely and clearly communicated across our Movement to increase self-awareness, resilience, and accountability among all stakeholders, allowing us to continuously adapt our strategies accordingly and perform periodic reviews to improve.

Changes and Actions

• Provide financial and human resources and expertise for collecting data for monitoring, evaluating and communicating progress on each of the recommendations and Movement activities at all levels of the Movement (global, regional, local).
• Distribute responsibilities around the processes of monitoring, evaluating and learning with all Movement stakeholders so that they have mutual accountability (including coordination and knowledge management) and ensure continual progress.
• Evaluate the relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, and impact of the development of the activities of the Movement.
  • Continuously evaluate the implementation of the strategy recommendations in real-time, and disseminate to impacted stakeholders.
  • Collaboratively establish common and contextualized indicators and desired impacts for measuring and monitoring progress on the goals of the strategic direction. This would include indicators for equity, advocacy, public policy, diversity in people and content, inclusion and openness towards newcomers, community health, technology, platforms’ usability, and accessibility, among others.
  • Facilitate joint analysis, discussion and learning with the participation of communities and impacted stakeholders as appropriate.
  • Access external, independent research to complement self-evaluation where needed and appropriate (always based on principles of participatory evaluation regarding Programs).
• Share and communicate results broadly for each Movement area of work and for strategy recommendations to raise awareness and accountability, both among affiliates and contributors.
• Iterate change processes in the areas of technology development, coordination, capacity building, policies, and governance systems, and promote validation after research and testing. This requires us to:
  • Involve affected communities/stakeholders to assure that lessons from the evaluation are shared to inform their activities at local and regional levels.
  • Involve affected communities/stakeholders to implement, determine and communicate changes to the strategy recommendations and related activities/programs.
• Adapt to meet new and altered situations and challenges by adopting policies and procedures based upon evaluations of the changing Movement and the changing world. This requires us to:
  • Increase the flexibility and adaptability of the structures and approaches we employ to implement each recommendation.
  • Incorporate evaluation results into decision-making at all institutional levels.
  • Use evaluation results to inform planning and budgeting of Movement stakeholders with fiscal and programmatic responsibilities.
  • Evaluate external conditions (socio-political, legal, environmental, etc.) to anticipate them, act on them if we can, and adapt to changes.

Rationale

While our Movement has organically grown in many areas, there are challenges that bottleneck our efforts of achieving the strategic direction. To date, efforts to evaluate and learn from Movement stakeholders have been ad hoc and un-sustained, often lacking local adaptability and usable knowledge management. This is a challenge for collective accountability and learning from each other. The strategic direction requires new thinking, skills, and structures to build evidence-based best, good, and emergent practices. These practices would document, evaluate, and learn from the progress or failures of our activities towards the strategic direction, over the long term. Any structured plan requires a process to iteratively evaluate the current infrastructure, communicate its needs with the Movement, learn, and develop solutions to grow resilient and prepare for the future.