Evaluation in Canada in 2025: what could be, what should be, and what to do now

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Publication TypeResearch BriefAbstractWhere is evaluation likely to be in 2025? The Australasian Evaluation Society issued a ‘predict the future’ challenge to a number of international evaluators, including the author, in September 2015. This paper, focusing primarily on Canada but with international implications, is the result. Partisans of chaos theory and complex systems analysis would probably say that predicting the future is a futile endeavour. Indeed, 10-year projections appear vain when we look back a decade and observe the massive changes that have occurred in our world (Figure 1). Ten years ago, Wikipedia, Facebook, Gmail and LinkedIn were in their infancy; Twitter, the iPhone and the iPad did not exist. Six years ago, we were getting excited about Windows 7, and ‘Big Data’ was being invented. From what we knew in 2005, could we have projected the 2015 situation in data availability and communications?AuthorGauthier, B.Publication CollectionNorthern Institute Research BriefsAlternative CollectionEvaluative Voices BriefIssueEV02CopyrightNorthern Institute, 2016ISSN2206-379XPublisherNorthern Institute, Charles Darwin UniversityPlace of PublicationDarwin