Tuesday 24th September 2019, 14:00 – 15:00 BST / 09:00 – 10:00 EDT
Presenter: Mary Kane, Concept Systems, Inc. (US)
Webinar Overview:
Participation in defining elements or issues within a system is a critical requirement in defining that system adequately. In many social policy spaces, hearing the voices of those who are affected, and who have a lived knowledge of the issues, is foundational. This is equally important in defining the elements of a complex system to anchor evaluation.
Valuing voice, an empowering extension of community-based participation, seeks and values the important input that each member of a group can provide, whether a teen at his computer or senior evaluator at a UN office. Group concept mapping (GCM) is the methodology that supports such engagement throughout the entire process that produces an innovation.
Simple rules apply in GCM to create and represent complexities among ideas and among people. Unlike traditional participatory modeling approaches in which the researcher organizes the participant-provided input, GCM seeks the voices of individuals with the requisite knowledge at three critical points: to 1) articulate the issues, 2) produce a unique individual sort of the combined issues and 3) individually input value or relevance of each issue, thus relying upon each participant to contribute “coding” of the set. The GCM technology, groupwisdom™ combines the resulting complex data from these simple tasks and produces multidimensional visualizations of every idea’s relationship to every other item, in both meaning and value to the desired outcome.
Learning Outcomes:
- The foundations and applications of Group Concept Mapping;
- The principles and relevance of MKO (More Knowledgeable Other);
- Initiatives that are relevant to the mission of CECAN relative to policy innovation;
- Groupwisdom™, the web-based application for data collection and results analysis.
Presenter Biography:
Mary Kane, MSLIS, is President of Concept Systems, Inc., a social research and evaluation firm specializing in capturing the knowledge and opinions of people and agencies to improve organizations, cultures and environments.
Ms. Kane assesses and addresses the needs of local, national and international agencies, guiding government offices, foundations, professional associations, corporations and academic and research institutions to awareness, consensus and decisions. A special emphasis in Ms Kane’s work is creating awareness of “group wisdom” in a community or organization, and guiding groups to harness collective knowledge to produce meaningful, measurable and useful outcomes for program, policy and population change.
Ms. Kane is author or co-author of many publications on the applications of Group Concept Mapping (GCM) in organizational decision-making and strategic planning and evaluation. Her current research focuses on “Valuing Voice” in underrepresented communities to support sustainable change; and expanding the definition of competencies for evaluation. Ms Kane is first author of the two authoritative texts on group concept mapping, Concept Mapping for Planning and Evaluation (2007, with William Trochim), and Conversations about Group Concept Mapping: Applications, Examples, and Enhancements (2018, with Scott Rosas).
How to Join:
This talk will take place via a Zoom Webinar (registration now closed).
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar. In case you are unable to attend, a recording of the webinar will be uploaded to our website following the event.