D5.1: Evaluation and Impact Assessment Plan

The current document, titled “Evaluation and Impact Assessment Plan”, has been developed within the framework of the TIME4CS project, which is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 101006201.

In TIME4CS, evaluation is integrated in all project activities from the very beginning, it is understood as a form of participatory evaluation that initiates the conversation on expectations, objectives, and impact already at the start of the project. Consequently, WP5 has started the evaluation process with representatives from the four implementing organizations - CRG, KTU, UniSR and Tyndall - from the beginning of the project. A first exercise was to understand the current situation in these organizations - an initial stock-taking - where the evaluation team collected data on the implementers' current status of institutional support for citizen science (CS) in the four intervention areas. Only when the baseline is known before starting the design and implementation of the roadmaps and Grounding Actions, a proper evaluation of the project’s benefits and outcomes at the end is possible.

To develop a set of indicators for institutional changes in RPOs towards more support of citizen science, WP5 closely cooperates with WP2 to accompany the development of roadmaps and Grounding Actions in the implementing organizations. These actions are expected to lead to the institutional changes in the implementing organizations and are assessed with regard to their usefulness and intermediate and long-term outcomes. Additionally, the evaluation team took a closer look at the framework for setting up and looking at the case studies analysis, which was developed in WP1 and fed the indicators of WP5.

The outcome of this work is a set of indicators for institutional changes for each intervention area and a set of indicators that keep track of changes in individual participants, like researchers, management and students. Quantitative and qualitative instruments to collect data for these indicators are set up and will be more concretely elaborated and tested in cooperation with the implementing organizations and in parallel to the implementation of the Grounding Actions. A set of monitoring and reflection questions will be the focus of three-monthly monitoring meetings with implementers that help to learn from the implementation process and iteratively shape the developed trainings, workshops, documents, strategies, etc., developed by the project. Finally, a set of overall project key performance indicators (KPIs) is introduced together with their status when writing this deliverable.