For those of you working with evaluation frameworks I would like to
make a special plea for you to think a bit about how this electronic
venue figures into your evaluation strategies.

It is - of course - a venue for conducting evaluation. It is useful
for administering questionnaires (or distributing them for printing)
and useful for data handling (storage, analysis). It also supports
on-going evaluation, in contrast to episodic evaluation, and
supports a tight feedback look for turning lessons learned into
changed practice.

It is also important for efficiency and equity in this or that
health promotion activity. All too many human service organizations
are still using the "human face of human services" to justify poor
organizational structures and work practices which divert labour and
resources away from the human face and toward poor organizational
work practices. Evaluation too often focuses on "deliverables"
without looking at best/bad practices in organizing to deliver the
deliverables.

This electronic venue is an important source of efficiency and
equity gains within organizations. The gains are compatable with
increased transparency, accountability and participation if the mix
of intranet, extranet and internet strategies is handled well (note:
each of those strategies has to do with attitude and logistics, not
with how much of an equipment budget an organization has).

Two buzz words in recent times are "knowledge management" and
"learning organization". Some attention should be given to what
these actually mean in the evaluation of a program, process, or
organization.

It is important to take explicit account of the fact that this
electronic venue is increasingly both a place for the work involved
in health promotion and part of the social process arena in which
health promotion -as a deliverable- take place.

I would urge those of you evaluating health promotion to take
explicit account of the existance of the electronic venue in your
evaluation design, not just as a tool for evaluation, but as part of
the health promotion workspace and social process arena.

In most cases this can be made compatible with a variety of models
of evaluation. The purpose is to 'unconfound' the effects of the
electronic venue on the process under evaluation, not to propose a
competing evaluation strategy. As we do this the quality of
evaluation will rise, as will the usefulness and rate of diffusion
of lessons learned.

Sam Lanfranco
Distributed Knowledge