My friend Chris Corrigan recently wrote a great blog post on weather and complexity, riffing off a statement from a retiring weather forecaster to talk about how to navigate complexity. One of my favourite COVID-era hobbies was tracking weather patterns with Chris and our friend Amanda. As systems swept in and out over the coast, we would announce in our group text the moment when rain reached our respective locations, from Nex̱wlélex̱wm/Bowen Island to East Van to New Westminister. Chris always has a fascinating app or person he follows on Twitter with cool maps and data about what is actually happening and the three of us got quite nerdy about it. (I'll never forget on the first night of the heat dome, when he showed me a heat map visualizing that column of hot, red air going straight up to the highest levels of the atmosphere, sitting on top of us with nowhere to go. Terrifying.)
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“Can we even get that data?”
That question, or some version of it, is usually one of the first, if not the first, question I hear when planning or discussing a new evaluation project. People want to know if it’s possible to collect data on a particular outcome or from a particular group. There’s often an undertone of, “I bet we can’t,” in the question too.
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