Publications about ParEvo

Participatory scenario planning in times of uncertainty: five key lessons, by Tiina Pasanen, 6 July 2020. ODI
Evaluating the Future. Podcast and paper prepared with and for the EU Evaluation Support Services Unit, Rick Davies, 2020

Sources of ideas

Campbell, Donald T. 1960. “Blind Variation and Selective Retentions in Creative Thought as in Other Knowledge Processes.” Psychological Review 67 (6): 380–400. and…
Bateson, Gregory. 1979. “Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity” . Dutton. “Information consists of differences that make a difference” p99.

which informed my PhD thesis…

Order and Diversity: Representing and Assisting Organisational Learning in Non-Government Aid Organisations. Ph.D Thesis. Centre for Development Studies, University of Wales – Swansea (1998)
- “Other potential applications of the evolutionary algorithm have been identified. One is the participatory development of past project histories (or future project plans) in the form of evolving branching structures of narrative. Participants would choose which branch-end to add a next step in the story. New branches would emerge where an existing branch was added to by more than one participant. Branches would die out where no new additions were placed there by participants. Such constructions could capture something of the contentious nature of history and the way in which it is socially constructed” Page 337.

which led to a small scale experiment in the mid-1990s…documented 10 years later…

Davies, Rick. 2007. “Evolving Storylines: A Participatory Design Process?” Rick On the Road (blog). May 27, 2007.

and my interest in this was revived by reading Scott Page on diversity…

Page, Scott E. 2011. Diversity and Complexity. Princeton University Press.
Page, Scott E., Earl Lewis, Nancy Cantor, and Katherine Phillips. 2017. The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay off in the Knowledge Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

and

Surowiecki, J. (2004). The wisdom of crowds: why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations. Little, Brown.

which also prompted some reading of the literature on scenario planning

Oteros-Rozas, Elisa, Berta Martín-López, Tim Daw, Erin Bohensky, James Butler, Rosemary Hill, Julia Martin-Ortega, et al. 2015. “Participatory Scenario Planning in Place-Based Social-Ecological Research: Insights and Experiences from 23 Case Studies.” Ecology and Society 20 (4).
N. Raford, Online foresight platforms: Evidence for their impact on scenario planning & strategic foresight, Technol. Forecast. Soc. Change (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2014.03.008
Amer, Muhammad, Tugrul U. Daim, and Antonie Jetter. 2013. “A Review of Scenario Planning.” Futures 46 (February): 23–40.

and now even more recently, the literature on collective intelligence…

Collective intelligence, as described by Wikipedia and elsewhere
Literature review on collective intelligence: a crowd science perspective. Yu, C., Chai, Y., & Liu, Y. (2018). International Journal of Crowd Science, 2(1), 64–73.
Futures Research Methods and Applications in Natural Resources,
David N. Bengston, Journal Society & Natural Resources An International Journal Volume 32, 2019 – Issue 10

and getting back to applications to evaluation …
- Derbyshire, J. (2019). Use of scenario planning as a theory-driven evaluation tool. FUTURES & FORESIGHT SCIENCE, 1(1),
- List, Dennis. 2007. “Scenario Network Mapping.” Journal of Futures Studies 11 (4): 77–96.