An introduction to Boston Civic Media's April 2016 event on Civic Media Impact and Assessment by PhD Researcher Erhardt Graeff. You can view the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqvoKmWukuo.

1. Boston Civic Media Consortium
Impact and Assessment
April 7, 2016
Erhardt Graeff
MIT Center for Civic Media
@erhardt
Civic Media Impact
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2. Boston Civic Media Consortium
Impact and Assessment
April 7, 2016
Erhardt Graeff
MIT Center for Civic Media
@erhardt
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3. Boston Civic Media Consortium
Impact and Assessment
April 7, 2016
Erhardt Graeff
MIT Center for Civic Media
@erhardt
What is impact?
• Change
• Changing Laws, Markets, Norms, Code
• Learning, Gaining Self-Efficacy, Affecting Emotions
• Community-building, Movement-building
• Evidence
• Impressions, Statistics, Products, Stories
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4. Boston Civic Media Consortium
Impact and Assessment
April 7, 2016
Erhardt Graeff
MIT Center for Civic Media
@erhardt
Caption Helvetica Regular 25/25 pt
Why is this important to me?
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5. Boston Civic Media Consortium
Impact and Assessment
April 7, 2016
Erhardt Graeff
MIT Center for Civic Media
@erhardt
Why is this important to us?
Defining success
If we are to define a field of Civic Media, we must be
able to define when interventions succeed
Empirically driving design toward what matters
Civic media’s deep connection to media and
technology makes our research accountable for future
design, and even theories must be tested
Communicating results and value to funders
They are also a stakeholder with an explicit goal of
social impact; and right now, we are responsible for
shaping how they conceive of impact
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6. Boston Civic Media Consortium
Impact and Assessment
April 7, 2016
Erhardt Graeff
MIT Center for Civic Media
@erhardt
Why is it so hard?
Research Design
Finding an appropriate question and methodology is a
conversation and compromise among many
stakeholders
Instrumentation
Answering the questions that really matter can
demand approaches and tools that don’t currently exist
Project Implementation
Research can complicate a project’s deployment or
even its primary mission
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7. Boston Civic Media Consortium
Impact and Assessment
April 7, 2016
Erhardt Graeff
MIT Center for Civic Media
@erhardt
A note of thanks
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