DME for Peace is a Website and a global community of over 4000 practitioners, evaluators and academics that share best and emerging practices on how to design, monitor and evaluate peacebuilding programs. It offers some 700 resources in the form of webinars, evaluation reports, how-to guides, templates and tools, as well as discussion forums, networking, jobs, training and funding opportunities.

The CES Alberta and NWT Chapter Advocacy Working Group will be spending the next three months conducting an Environmental Scan of Evaluation Capacity in Alberta, and are interested in hearing from other CES chapters who have previously conducted evaluation capacity environmental scans.

The not-for-profit consulting firm FSG, recently published a three volume Guide to Evaluating Collective Impact. Available online, free of charge, this guide is part of the Collective Impact Forum's toolbox. This forum takes roots in an article published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review in 2011, which introduced the idea of collective impact.

The African Evaluation Association launched the African Evaluation Journal last Fall (2013), which can be accessed online free of charge. This new journal publishes high-quality peer-reviewed articles, in English or in French, once a year. The journal aims to contribute to building evaluation-related knowledge and practice, in support of effective developmental policies on the African continent.

If you are on vacation, or relaxing on the beach this summer, and find that you just can't put your evaluation mind to rest, check out Molly Engle's blog Evaluation is an Everyday Activity, for a list of good evaluation reads. For some light reading, Engle recommends Ernest R. House's Regression to the Mean: A Novel of Evaluation Politics (Information Age Publishing, 2007). House is an influential evaluation theorist who thinks evaluation should seek truth, beauty and justice.

Evaluators read, write, collect data, think, make judgments, and... listen a lot. But, how well do we listen? Richard Kreuger (author of the classic Focus Groups: A Practical Guide for Applied Research, Sage) talks about Qualitative Listening in this interview he gave to Susan Eliot, who published it on her blog The Listening Resource.

As in Canada, the United Kingdom's government announced its intention to terminate the national census. But a recent report by their House of Commons Committee on Public Administration says it is "too soon to scrap the Census".

The Nova Scotia Chapter of CES is supporting students in the Master in Public Administration (Management) (MPA(M)) at Dalhousie University, Halifax through the "Issues in Public Sector Evaluation: Fifteen Great Ideas" event. The University and the Chapter are promoting attendance at the session, where students will present their research on issues in evaluation. The Chapter is hosting a reception for students and will introduce them to the CES.

As a summary of the beginner's guide to program evaluation series that the CES Web team has pulled together from short pamphlets created by the Global Social Change Project, this handout sums all the separate documents that were published in this series in the previous years. Here is a reminder of the first nine guides re-posted by CES:

The Revue Gouvernance has published its first issue of 2014 (Vol. 11, No. 1, Summer 2014). This issue, discussing two cases of governance in Canadian organizations and one in Africa includes the following three papers: