Eval Cafe

Happy New Year! To kick off 2019, Carolyn and Brian take a look backwards and forward - tune in to hear how they did with 2018’s directions and their plans for the coming 12 months! Conversation topics include community development, creativity and arts-based approaches, the therapeutic benefits of podcasting, teasers for upcoming episodes, and a discussion on whether 2019 will (finally) be the Year of the Trombone.

Full show notes available at our website.

Join Brian, Carolyn, and special guest Kim van der Woerd (Reciprocal Consulting) as we wander into the complex and intriguing world of principles-focused evaluation. Will our paradigms be shifted? Will our hearts be centered? Will we remember all the stuff that Michael Quinn Patton tried to instil in us from all the workshops and books and conference presentations?* Let's hope! Tune in and find out what we have to say about how we can use storytelling, whether program logic models can be redeemed, and how we're trying to overcome barriers to using principles-focused evaluation in our work.

Full episode notes available at our website.

You definitely want to swipe right on this episode to hear Carolyn and Brian talk about client relationships! We discuss looking beyond the dating profile, deciding what questions to ask right at the get-go, handling the inevitable relationship woes, and deciding when to rekindle the romance or just walk away. Carolyn put it best: "The relationship metaphors just don't stop!"

Full episode notes available at our website.

Carolyn and Brian are back in the Eval Cafe and ready for a brand new school-year that’s just “chalk” full of learning! Pull up a desk, get out your binders and cahiers, and be prepared to take notes because this will be on the final exam. What’s Brian’s ultimate whiteboard hack? How does Carolyn justify putting a bed in their office? What educational experiences are Carolyn and Brian most looking forward to and how did they spend their summer vacation? Warning: this episode comes with a reading list.

This is the episode that may as well have been sponsored by Ikea, Staples, and 3M (makers of the best post-its, as long as you don’t accidentally buy the ‘pop-up’ kind). Please send us free office supplies! Also, the word of this episode is “excited”–count how many times Carolyn says it, win a prize!

(Apologies for a small amount of audio distortion on the track at 12:26.)

Full show notes available at: https://evalcafe.wordpress.com/2018/09/20/episode-12-evalcafe-goes-back-to-school/

Carolyn and Brian pack their bags (and more importantly their podcasting gear) and meet up in Calgary for the Canadian Evaluation Society’s annual conference! This episode, recorded as a Thematic Breakfast Roundtable, features five attendees who joined our intrepid hosts at a wholly-unreasonable time of morning on the final day of the conference. Among other topics, we talk about the conference theme (Co-Creation), the upcoming updates to the CES evaluator competencies (now with 41% fewer words!), the idea of crashing a mayors’ conference, and the relative population density of Australia and Canada. We promise, the conversation makes more sense when you listen to it. Full show notes available at: https://evalcafe.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/episode-11-co-created-conversation