About
Ownership

There are many definitions of ownership. Here is what we mean by ownership in the context of evaluation.

Our Definition of Ownership

For evaluations, we define ownership as a combination of 1) the real option to lead the evaluation, and 2) the real ability to claim the evaluation's outputs.

1) The Option to Lead

Leading the evaluation does not mean doing everything by yourself. It means choosing what you:

  • Do independently (with as much support as you want)
  • Do collaboratively (with Eval Design Studio and/or the organization)
  • Delegate (when it is wise, necessary, or required by ethics or law)

Each of these statements demonstrates leadership:

  • "We want space to decide on our own and then present our decision once we're done."
  • "We want you to facilitate a process where we make a decision."
  • "We want to delegate this task or establish safeguards because it's wise, or because we need to comply with ethics or local laws."

2) Claiming Evaluation Outputs

You should also have the real ability to claim what the evaluation produces, such as:

  • New knowledge
  • Recommendations and action items
  • Public communications
  • The ability to hold those in power accountable (e.g., organizations or leaders)

Ownership in Practice

Broadly, ownership shows up in three areas: deliberation, closing decisions, and completing tasks.

A) Deliberating Options

Deliberation is the process of thinking through and discussing your options. During this process, you might choose to consult the Studio team, our community touchpoints (if available), trusted community leaders, spiritual practices, or anything else that helps with your decision making.

To facilitate your deliberation, you can use your own tools if you have them, or have EDS facilitate deliberation using our tools. In most cases, it will make sense if EDS facilitates. When we facilitate, we do not make decisions and we do not offer our opinions unless explicitly asked or ethics/the law requires.

Readiness Reviews

Before some decisions are finalized, EDS may need to conduct a Readiness Review to ensure the decision is:

If a decision does not meet these safeguards, we will flag the issue, explain the challenge, and provide revision options for you to deliberate.

B) Closing Decisions

After decisions have been deliberated and cleared a Readiness Review (if one is necessary), they need to be finalized. In this regard, you will determine two things:

One: The process for closing decisions (e.g., a vote)
Two: Who participates in this process (e.g., whether EDS or the organization also casts votes)

You may use any method of closing decisions that is safe and ethical. Some options that you may already find culturally appropriate and familiar include:

Definition: Each member expresses their support for a given option. The option with enough support wins.

Considerations: What will be your threshold for "enough" support? You might choose a simple majority, super majority, plurality (the option with the most votes wins, regardless of the percent of overall votes cast), or something else. You'll also need to decide a quorum (the minimum number of people who must be present in order for a vote to take place).

Definition: Everyone in the group emphatically supports the decision.

Considerations: What will you do if everyone does not emphatically support a decision close to the deadline? Will you fall back on another method (e.g., voting) or something else, such as escalating/deferring to a trusted decision maker?

C) Completing Evaluation Tasks

Most decisions will create tasks. You can choose whether these tasks are done:

Technically, you can choose to be consulted on a task; however, we generally discourage this because it can reproduce traditional, non-community-owned approaches.

If you decide to be consulted, we will document how your feedback shaped the final output and any constraints that prevented incorporating your feedback.

Similar to decisions, the output of most evaluation tasks will need to clear a Readiness Review.

Next Steps

Soon, we'll understand how you define ownership in the context of this evaluation, then codify this definition, and how you want to make decisions, in an Ownership Charter.

Throughout the evaluation, we will check in to see if your definition of ownership has changed, whether and to what extent you are experiencing ownership, and what we can do to improve your experience.