Elicitating, Framing and Communicating Narratives 15th October 2012 || San Servolo 

Evaluating impact of social innovation projects Social innovation projects are characterized by ontological uncertainty: we can’t specify a priori all the people and organizations that will participate in – and be affected by – the transformation processes they bring in their wake, nor all the individual and social values that these agents will bring to bear in evaluating the consequences of these processes, for them and for others. So how can we assess the impact of these projects??? 15th October 2012 || San Servolo 2 

The Athenian Condition Q1. Who has to be involved in the evaluation of the project? Everyone is affected by it -- and her/his values BUT Q2. How can we give them all a voice without reproducing the usual power relations experts- lay people? 15th October 2012 || San Servolo 3 

The evaluation should: - Follow the process triggered by the project since its beginning; - Trace the cascades of transformations in agent-artifact space; - Provide feedback to those who initiate the project and all who participate directedly/ indirectedly in the cascades of changes induced by it in order to • Enhance their understanding of what is happening so that they can reflect on what has happened, to whom, how this affects them, enabling them to make sense of the process retrospectively – and to help suggest appropriate actions; • Provide an informational and interpretative basis for process participants to develop an empathetic understanding of one another, by/thus creating mutual trust and opening up new spaces of possibilities for coordinated and shared action (and values). Dynamic Evaluation 

The Role of Narrative • If we think of evaluation as the possibility to foster retrospective sense making, we need to take into account of the fact that the form in which we make sense of our experience and communicate it is in the form of stories • Therefore stories must be integrated into the DE process – and eliciting, framing and communicating values becomes one of its principal methodological requirements 15th October 2012 || San Servolo 5 

Toolkit for Dynamic Evaluation • Archive and database: collecting data into a system that is potentially accessible by all participants in the project (different permissions for access and use) • Storyboard: a twofold tool that allows the framing of narratives: – Evaluators could use it to work with individuals and groups of participants to help them in formulating narratively correct and narratively coherent stories of what is going on in the process ; – Evaluators could use it as an analytic tool that could give them a broad, multilayer and multidimensional view of all the narratives that are currently running in the project and that are available to them. • Network analysis: tells us what kinds of interactions structures are playing out in the process. 15th October 2012 || San Servolo 6 

Pilot Projects • Green Communities (IT) • Educational Pioneers (NL)