Good day everyone. As David indicated in a post last week, we do have a deadline to get our evaluations done for this micro group and participation in the evaluation process has been disappointing so far. As you might notice in the Bulletin area, we had a timeline of about 20-25 weeks for the entire project to be completed. We started in January on the 11th, so that means we need to wrap things up around the second week of June! That means we need to have the resources evaluated, review the data (I have already automated that part), draft a final report, edit that report and finally publish all within the next 6 - 8 weeks.
As I promised last week, I have created a way to report out on which resources have been evaluated and how many evaluations we have so far. This tool is automatically updated as people complete evaluations. You will find this data conveniently located on our Online Tools And Resource Evaluation website at the bottom of the home page in a chart. You will also find all the instructions and resources you need to start evaluating. It really is a one-stop shop to figure out what you need to do and it takes only a few minutes to review a resource.
NOTE: If you see we already have more than 2 evaluations done for a resource, please do not take the time to evaluate that resource. It would be nice to get 3 or 4 reviews for each resource, but that is a luxury ONLY IF we get at least 2 done for the resources in our list first.
Thus far, we have very poor numbers in terms of how many members have attempted an evaluation and we have not attempted to evaluate even half of the resources we identified early in our work. I managed to do 6 evaluations (of the 12 done so far) and it did not take me more than an hour to do so because I was familiar with the resources I picked. If everyone just picked resources they were familiar with, we could have a much richer data pool to process!
On May 29th, I will be ending the evaluation portion of our work in order to have some time to process the reporting that needs to be done. It is very important to this project that members find a few minutes to do some evaluations so that we have some data to report on. Having 2 or 3 people evaluate every resource will simply give us the perspective of those two or three people which is not the intent of this project.
As always, please let me know if you encounter difficulties so I can help out. From those that have tried the evaluation, it appears all is working quickly, efficiently and painlessly. The challenges so far seem to be people making the time. Please let me know what I may do to help you start evaluating this week.