Social computing for impact assessment of social change projects

Abstract

One problem that both philanthropic foundations and scientific organizations have recently started to tackle more seriously is assessing the societal impact of the work they are funding by going beyond traditional methods and metrics. In collaboration with makers and funders of social justice information products, we have been leveraging social computing techniques for practical impact assessment. In this paper, we identify which of the main impact goals as defined in the social change domain can be assessed by using our computational solution, illustrate our approach with an empirical case study, and compare our findings to those that can be obtained with traditional methods. We find that our solution can complement and enhance the findings and interpretations that can be obtained with standard techniques used in the given application domain, especially when applying data mining techniques to natural language text data, such as representations of public awareness, dialogue and engagement around various issues in their cultural contexts.