The 2026 Australian Evaluation Society international evaluation conference in Darwin was a great experience, particularly our Great (Mostly Serious) Crowd-Sourced Debate!
What’s a crowd-sourced debate, you ask? We came up with this fun alternative to the traditional debate format to build audience engagement – we wanted to make sure people actually thought actively about the merits of both sides, so we decided they should have a role in determining the arguments. We assembled two teams of three speakers and assigned affirmative and negative sides, like in traditional debating. The First and Second speakers proceeded in the usual way, but the third speaker was the audience! Everyone watching the debate could use a QR code to submit their best arguments and rebuttals for the debate, and the two Third Speakers had the job of rapidly synthesising everything we were given into a somewhat-coherent speech and giving voice to the audience’s arguments. It was pretty fun!
Here’s out abstract: https://aes26.sched.com/event/2OF6R/the-2026-mostly-serious-crowd-sourced-debate-evaluations-pluralism-and-its-external-influence?iframe=yes&w=100%&sidebar=yes&bg=no
Strap in for a provocative, contentious, and fun session. We’re putting a spin on the classic debate where two teams will go head-to-head to argue the topic: “Evaluation’s pluralism strengthens its external influence.”
On the affirmative side, a spirited case for why pluralism is evaluation’s superpower. Surely leaning into our intersections with disciplines like policy, research and economics expands our reach, relevance, and impact. Embracing pluralism helps evaluators speak multiple “languages,” build trust with diverse stakeholders, and positions evaluation as a boundary‑spanning connector capable of influencing decisions in complex systems. Think: more collaboration, more innovation, and more doors opening because evaluators can flex and adapt.
The negative team will challenge! Doesn’t boundless pluralism stretch evaluation too far, making our unique identity fuzzy and our professional standards harder to uphold? Aren’t we risking dilution of expertise and inconsistencies in practice? Won’t trying to be “everything to everyone” only confuse commissioners and undermine the credibility we’ve spent decades building? Without firmer boundaries, evaluation risks becoming a methodological buffet with no clear value proposition at all.
And then there’s you-our third speaker. A debate without rebuttal is like an evaluation report without findings – unthinkable! So, pick a side and help our third speakers craft a knockout final argument.
Will it be chaotic? Quite possibly. Could things get messy? Almost definitely. Will you have FOMO if you miss it? Without a doubt.
Featuring thought leaders Emily Gates, Martina Donkers, Matt Healey, George Argyrous, Kate McKegg and AES Fellow, Rick Cummings, this session promises to be the highlight of the conference. Who will be victorious? Let the 2026 (Mostly-Serious) Crowd-Sourced Debate begin!
It was my job to wrangle the Third Speaker arguments for the Affirmative team!
My approach was to rely as much as possible on the audience. So I thought I’d put this together to show what I said, and how much was verbatim or paraphrased from the audience submissions! Luckily, Matt recorded and published the debate as part of the It Depends podcast, so I have some record of what I actually said. 😅 I was going to do this as a LinkedIn article, but I couldn’t figure out how to make a table, so I’ve done it here on my website instead.
So, here is the Third Speaker Affirmative (audience contribution) for the Great Debate: that evaluation’s pluralism strengthens our external influence.
| Audience suggestions | What I said |
| I think we’ve got about a two to three [ratio] on the contributions favouring the affirmative. Because we all know the affirmative is where it’s at today. | |
| Interesting that Jess talks about system level thinking, runs a workshop on that & then says negative about a pluralistic approach can create a coherent account | Now, we did have someone from the audience note that it is interesting to hear Jess talk about system-level thinking, and running a workshop on systems and thinking, and then be negative that a pluralistic approach! Negative about how pluralistic approach could create a coherent account. Jess is in fact being pluralistic in her thinking right here and right now by stepping into the negative team! |
| Did Emily leave the table just because she was too shy to say she was on the affirmative? 😂 What has Jess done to her? lol | We also had someone wonder, did Emily leave the table because she was too shy to really admit to these negative arguments. She’s in fact, losing her voice. She couldn’t bear to put voice to these arguments. |
| Our strength is our innate diversity | Because we all know, that evaluation’s pluralism is, in fact, its strength. |
| The affirmative doesn’t suggest a set of methods; it suggests a lens. So the opposition’s argument that we can’t “have it all” is not relevant. | Our affirmative team is not suggesting a set of methods. We’re suggesting a lens. So the opposition’s argument that we can’t have it all? Simply not relevant. |
| I’m going to go through three different topics here. We’re going to talk about evolution, democracy and evaluation identity. So we did hear about evolution from Rick earlier in the session. We listened to Michael Scriven roll over in his grave. Because, in fact, we must evolve, or we constrain growth. We need to be creatively and adapt our paradigms. | |
| Biology teaches us of specialist/generalists, where specialist species, like the koala, have evolved to fit unique niches that no other species fill. Generalists, like the mighty saltwater croc, can eat all kinds of things/ swim anywhere + can better withstand shocks/disasters | We can’t be like the koala, which has evolved into a unique niche that no other species can fill, and is going extinct. We must be generalists, like the mighty saltwater crocodile! Which can eat all sorts of things, and has been around longer than the dinosaurs! |
| No evaluation or context is the same we need different approaches, and thinking to shift to different contexts – you can never step in the same river twice because the waters always changing, so don’t forget to take your shoes off and enjoy the experience! | You can never step in the same river twice because the waters are always changing. So don’t forget to take your shoes off and enjoy the experience. Do avoid the crocodiles. But understand that we need this pluralism in order to take our profession forward and evolve as things change. |
| If it wasn’t for pluralism, the benefits of learning from one field wouldn’t be brought into others. | We heard from the Affirmative team that a coherent professional identity supports democratic accountability. But we need the ability to speak multiple languages in order to do so. Otherwise, that’s not very democratic. We know what happens when we get too much homogeneity in a single discipline. We heard about that from George, and the fact of economics having crawled up its own… something or other. |
| Evaluation aims to influence stakeholders, so it must embrace pluralism. We draw on multiple perspectives. We’ve got multiple uses for evaluation, multiple users, and so we can see the whole problem because of this. Not just one part of the elephant, but the whole elephant. And that is fundamental to good democratic accountability. Respecting a wide variety of approaches and views, and ideas across our communities so that we can bring them together and have that external influence for evaluation. | |
| In addition to pluralistic approach to methods evaluation will benefit from taking a pluralistic approach to values inquiry and drawing from different disciplines and sectors | We benefit from taking a key pluralistic approach to values inquiry and drawing from different disciplines and different sectors. |
| The reality is that everyone can be an evaluator which is going to lead to pluralism | Evaluator identity is pluralist. The reality is that anyone can be an evaluator, which is going to lead to pluralism. |
| Evaluation should look like the country, the places, the communities it is practiced in | Evaluation should look like the countries, the places, and the communities that it is practiced in. |
| To deny pluralism is to deny the multidisciplinarity of our profession | A clear professional purpose may be important, but it’s not helpful to lead with how different we all are. [This is where I realised I’d read my notes wrong and read out one of the negative’s talking points!] We heard this argument from the affirmative. [I meant to say ‘negative’.] But if we come back to multiple purposes, that means we need multiple types of evaluator. |
| Evaluation is of pluralism because it needs a whole set of skills and collaboration across policy, designing, planing, data and methodology areas. | Evaluation needs pluralism, because we need a whole set of skills and collaborations across policy, design, planning, data, methodology areas. |
| Dichotomies are the enemy of evaluation. When we decide the right way for all things (regardless of the approach), we stop interrogating value and stop being evaluators all together | Dichotomies are the enemy of evaluation. When we decide the right way for all things, regardless of the approach, we stop interrogating value. And that means we stop being evaluators altogether. |
| The negative is focused on arguing about pluralism of methods, but what about pluralism of values, principles etc. Pluralism is important on many levels, not just methodology or professional identity. | The negative is focused on arguing about pluralism of methods. What about pluralism of values and principles? Pluralism is important on many levels. Not just methodology or professional identity. |
| We heard that we need to have a clear professional purpose. We heard that we need a clear case for why humans are better than AI. Well, it’s because we’re human, because we’re diverse. AI brings a specific set of values decided by eight tech bros in Silicon Valley somewhere. Evaluation brings plurality and breadth to our values. We talk to our stakeholders, we understand different perspectives, we bring those paradigms. And that strengthens our external influence. | |
| Evaluation is able to hold pluralism and make meaning from it to create value for society. Maybe the answer is educating people more on what evaluation is, not narrowing the field to fit a specific box that we can tell people about | Evaluation is able to hold pluralism, and make meaning from it, to create value for society. [Bell rings!] |
| We are not sure how we feel about the debate but we are affirmative for Beth’s fashion pjs | We did also hear one amazing comment from the audience. We are not sure how we feel about the debate, but we are affirmative, of course, on Beth’s fashion pyjamas. |
| To quote the singer from last nights dinner: “I don’t know what evaluation is, but it’s obviously important, so keep evaluating!” | But to conclude, to quote the singer from last night’s dinner, “I don’t know what evaluation is, but it’s obviously important. So keep evaluating!” |
Phew!! It was great fun but hard work trying to work everyone’s comments into a coherent(ish) structure on the fly in about 15 minutes! I tried as much as I could to both use audience comments verbatim, and to reinforce my team mates’ arguments and rebut some of the Negative’s arguments (trying to remember my debating lessons from year 11!).
We had 26 Affirmative submissions, and I managed to read out (or paraphrase) 17 of them. There were a couple more that I didn’t manage to say verbatim, but absolutely contributed to the argument! And there were a few others with typos that I didn’t completely understand. 😂
Overall I think the crowd-sourced debate was a great format! Let’s do it again. 😊
