Ready to head to Charlotte, North Carolina November 16-20 for the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) annual conference? This year’s conference is being shaped by a significant redesign, with changes intended to make the conference easier to navigate and offer stronger learning and community building opportunities for attendees.

What’s going to be different, you ask? Well, the main difference is how conference sessions are organized; rather than organizing sessions by TIG sector or content area, sessions will now be organized around five broad professional learning streams that are organized around the ways evaluators practice, learn, innovate, and strengthen the profession:

• Foundations and Core Practice – focuses on core evaluation practices, theory, ethics, standards, and fundamentals of professional practice.
• Design, Methods, Evidence, and Use – focuses on evaluation methods, design, data analysis, evidence generation, use, AI-enabled methods, and methodological innovation.
• Equity, Culture, and Justice in Evaluation - makes equity a core professional learning area and focuses on: culturally responsive evaluation, equity-centered practice; indigenous evaluation; social justice; community voice and inclusion and representation.
• Innovation, Complexity, Systems, and Futures - focuses on systems thinking; complexity-aware evaluation; emerging technologies; AI, foresight and futures thinking; and innovative approaches to evaluation.
• Building Professional Community Within and Beyond AEA - focuses strengthening evaluators through career development, mentoring, leadership, professional identity, collaboration, and building the profession itself.

The redesign was driven by several factors. With more than 50 TIGs, it was becoming increasingly difficult to reduce duplicated sessions and attendees often found the program  difficult to navigate. AEA also sought to improve equitable access to presentation opportunities while also responding to declining conference participation, rising conference costs, and increased staffing demands.

In addition to creating the five streams, AEA implemented a robust conference proposal  selection process. Although proposals are now submitted through the five streams rather than individual TIGs, TIG members continue to play an important role in the review process by serving as individual reviewers and Stream Team members. Proposals were reviewed individually and then sent to a Stream Team that had the un-enviable task of selecting just 10 proposals - out of many, many more proposals - to ensure a diverse and robust set of sessions. Proposals not selected for a session could be recommended to be presented as a poster or Roundtable session.

Change always brings a measure of uncertainty, but it also creates opportunities. This year's conference will give all of us an opportunity to experience a new model, connect across new and traditional boundaries, and continue to shape the next chapter of AEA.

AEA conference registration is now open! Get early bird pricing until October 12th.