Discussions/Submissions/Capturing Social Change through Outcome Mapping

Capturing Social Change through Outcome Mapping

Author

Jaime Anstee and Amanda Bittaker

+ Community Discussants TBD

Description

How can we understand the social and environmental changes brought about through Wikimedia programs and partnerships? In the Wikimedia world of programs, there are many challenges to measuring outcomes that have a less direct, but influential effect on the success of our movement. Outcome Mapping provides a useful framework for helping to get beyond the direct outputs and products of our work to capture the intermediate and longer-term movement impact brought about through influence in a more complex social system. Influence is not an easy thing to measure, even when you have a clear behavior to measure, it is unlikely that you can claim credit for changing it because there are so many different influences on people every day. Still, strategies that focus on monitoring the behaviors and policies of our participants and program partners can help us to check in on our assumptions about how our outreach programs work and to better understand the contributions that our programs make beyond their immediate effect on online metrics. Such monitoring can also help us to understand the intended, as well as unintended, results of our efforts by extending our view of outcomes that are beyond our direct control. How might we use outcome mapping strategies to better capture the stories of our combined Wikimedia work and to better surface our shared movement impact?

Purpose

Participants will engage in discussion of outcomes, metrics, and the importance of developing ways to measure changes in behavior, relationships, and/or actions which we wish to influence through our community and program partnerships. In this discussion session we will outline the opportunities and challenges to existing metrics models and the potential for exploring measures that might help to better capture stories of the social change impact of programs. We will discuss the costs and benefits of such efforts, and identify potential shared opportunities to explore and try out these methods. (Note: This is separate from the proposed training session that will actually walk folks through a few of the strategic tools from the Outcome Mapping approach).

Targeted participants

Community leaders working to influence social change to increase participation in and support for Wikimedia partnerships and projects.

Preparatory readings or materials

Relevant experts

• GLAM leaders, those leading partnerships in science, medicine, and technology
• Outreach leaders seeking to influence attitudes, behaviors, and/or policy environments.

Questions & Comments 22

• Hi Jaime and Sati, thank you for your proposal. Would you mind rephrasing it so that it is easier understand for readers who aren't fluent in English and have little understanding of the sociological(?) concepts mentioned here? For example, since this is will not be a presentation, will I be able to participate meaningfully without knowing what "Outcome Mapping" means? I'm asking this since there will be no time for any introductory explanations. Thanks, --Gnom (talk) 10:53, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Hello, Gnom. Thank you for your feedback. I have rewritten, please let me know if it is now more accessible. I have also needed to swap co-facilitator's due to Wikimania scheduling. To answer your question about background being necessary: No, while I have also now linked a presentation, the discussion will be entry level and be more general than technical. Those wanting to learn more on the specific strategies and how to engage more will be given instructions for doing so. Thanks. JAnstee (WMF) (talk) 17:55, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
• @JAnstee (WMF): This sounds mostly like a complicated topic you want to present on. I'm afraid it would require too much introduction to actually have a solid discussion on it, and I don't see the clear question either (your scope is very wide - 'discussion of outcomes, metrics, and the importance of developing ways to measure changes in behavior, relationships, and/or actions which we wish to influence through our community and program partnerships' - basically you want to discuss everything?) and it has no clear purpose. I propose not to schedule this topic as a discussion. Effeietsanders (talk) 09:13, 20 April 2016 (UTC)
  • Effeietsanders Thank you for your feedback. While yes, it is a complicated topic, it is one that I have just piloted two versions of at Wikimedia Conference. With this experience, I can confidently assure you that it is not the case that there would not be enough time. Outcome Mapping as a strategy for measuring programs is what the discussion is about. It has costs and benefits that vary from program to program and across affiliates with different evaluation capacity, so that will be what makes up the discussion besides a basic overview to understand the problem and some basic for considering Outcome Mapping as a solution. JAnstee (WMF) (talk) 17:55, 16 May 2016 (UTC)