The MERL Center is an interdisciplinary community that is creating resources for monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (MERL) practitioners to understand if, how, and when to use open source solutions. In February 2022, the MERL Center expanded its scope! In addition to our focus on MERL and open source, we are now exploring topics on MERL and data science, and MERL and human-centered design.

The MERL Center is a part of the larger MERL Tech community and was organized and funded by GitHub's Social Impact, Tech for Social Good team, with support from TCC Group. You can read more about the MERL Center here.. As of May 2023, the MERL Center is a project of Civic Tech Structure, Inc. a 501(c)(3).

This is the public repository of the MERL Center on which publicly available learning content and the code for the MERL Center website are hosted. MERL Center members collaborate on the MERL Tech GitHub organization (account) through two repositories - this public repo and a repo that is only for members. Anyone who wishes to propose and contribute a new piece of content must go through a basic onboarding process and become a MERL Center member, which is free of charge. MERL Center members must have some experience in MERL and/or open source, data science or human-centered design. Anyone - regardless of MERL Center membership - can access and fork published MERL Center content on this public repository. Currently, only MERL Center members can propose changes to content with pull requests, though this may open up to more people in the future.

• MERL working definition
• Data science working definition
• Human-centered design working definition

• Learning content (see documentation on how to contribute) is under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license
• Code is under the MIT license.

Check out the contributing instructions for non technical contributors

If you'd like to become a MERL Center member, please fill out this form. We ask MERL Center members have at least one year of professional work experience in MERL and/or open source.

Content found on this repo can also be found at https://merlcenter.org.