External Evaluation

External Evaluation of the iPlant Collaborative

East Main Educational Consulting, LLC (EMEC) of Wilmington, NC, has been contracted by the iPlant Collaborative to provide external evaluation services for the project. The role of the external evaluators is to collect data from the project and its participants for independent analysis that results in formative reporting to the Executive Team. The information in the reports is considered by project representatives to assist in making data-based decisions. At the conclusion of iPlant, a summative report will be generated describing the project as a whole, including lessons learned.

In an effort to understand the development of iPlant and the community that forms around it, EMEC collaborates with the Social Science Team to align data collection for both project aspects. As part of the evaluation and research plans, community members are invited to participate in various data collection activities depending upon the iPlant event. These may include online surveys, phone interviews, or in-person interviews at iPlant events. Your participation and feedback is important to the project, which is committed to a community-focused development plan. Your responses will be used in many different ways for the evaluation, including:

• Independently measuring the success of iPlant in relation to the project's defined goals and outcomes;
• Generating formative reports so that the project team may make data-based project decisions; and
• Creating a feedback loop that includes the community of users.