The paper describes the Shared Process Evaluation System (SHAPES) for analyzing the process of community development. The system's basic organizing unit is the critical incident, an event judged to be essential to the continuation of a particular community development project or as representing a choice point in the project's history. Three sets of design criteria were used in developing SHAPES: criteria related to information discrimination and gathering; those related to validity, bias, and reliability; and those related to flexibility of information storage and retrieval. In the system, community development is defined as taking place when the priorities of different fields (individual or group actors in the community) are in relative agreement and result in effective shared activity. The SHAPE System in operation addresses itself to four questions: Who was involved? What happened? In what contextual model should the project outcome be viewed? What were the project outcomes? These four questions together with the instruments designed to provide data for their analysis constitute the essence of SHAPES. A field test of SHAPES produced positive reactions from an outside evaluator, field agents, and community informants, thereby encouraging its further refinement and application. (JR)