Evaluating Participatory Facilitated Conversations within the Art of Hosting Framework. Issue 149 (March 2016) - Schwartz, Alissa
Abstract: The Art of Hosting conversations that matter (AoH) is a practice framework for using participatory conversational structures and principles to foster meaningful conversation and collective intelligence. This chapter provides an overview of many of the conversational structures used in the AoH community, an explanation of the function of "harvesting" conversations, and a suggested framework for making decisions about evaluating participatory conversations. Evaluation of participatory conversations can focus on discerning the effects of a stand‐alone conversation or a series of conversations that may involve the same or different groups of people meeting multiple times. There are three major approaches to evaluation—formative, summative, and developmental—that lend themselves well in conceptualizing the evaluation of AoH approaches, where the unit of analysis can be at multiple levels: individual, group, and systemic. The chapter concludes with the description of an evaluation of a World Café conversation facilitated at the 2014 American Evaluation Association conference in Denver, Colorado.