Lessons Learned per Instrumental: Creating good relationships and building trust: "Network Building"

RRI Roadmap Milestone 1

• Realize a complete inventory of local skills needed for the topic of academic actors, start-ups or companies already established in the region;
• Keep in mind the local context to answer local needs and specificities;
• Attract different stakeholders in order to have a diversity and complementarity to obtain inputs as complete as possible;
• Plan the stakeholders carefully to ensure that the right people, stakeholder groups and organisations are in the room;
• Organise carefully the workshop phases for successfully meeting the objectives and for engaging all participants;
• Be careful of possible competition of other events happening as the same time in the same city or on the same topic;
• Offer an incentive for citizens in order to attract people to attend at the workshop;
• Find a topic which will attract different stakeholders;
• Explore the questions that are relevant to the real-life concerns of the group.

RRI Roadmap Milestone 2

• Provide a good incentive and personal benefits to motivate people to attend the workshop(s) and processes;
• Use using storytelling to describe the challenge with clear and concrete examples;
• Use diverse communication channels (e-mail, telephone, face-to-face and word of mouth) for recruiting participants;
• During the recruitment phase, ensure the methodology has been clearly explained and understood, to avoid misunderstandings during the event;
• Define the date, finalise the workshop topic and have communication material two months ahead;
• Focus the workshop and the RRI presentation on a topic relevant for the participants and related to their daily lives;
• Contact directly the person to recruit via e-mails or telephone;
• Address a specific subject that concerns multidisciplinary stakeholders;
• Invite additional stakeholders and communities to join the MARINA knowledge sharing platform and direct them to the results and materials related to Deep Sea Mining;
• Present the Mobilisation and Mutual Learning and RRI approach;
• Consider personal e-mails as the recruitment mechanism because it has been proven by far the most effective recruitment mechanism;
• Identify motives for policy makers and implementers to participate in the workshops as they are reluctant in participating;
• Perform an analysis of publics' behaviours before engaging the public engagement;
• Use audience targeted communication for all types stakeholders to engage them;
• Motivate to receive ahead of the workshop and on time the participants' action ideas and to attract participants from all stakeholders’ groups;
• Be aware that policy-makers are not easy to engage unless they see a specific benefit that fits their agenda;
• Carefully consider the workshop's duration as many participants think that a one day-long workshop is too long;
• Prepare a concise information corpus for participants.

RRI Roadmap Milestone 3

• Create a relaxing but effective work experience and joint decision-making with the world café methodology;
• Send a personalised and direct (e-mail or telephone) invitation to ensure a better buy-in of targeted participants;
• Allocate more time for group discussions during workshops;
• Adopt participative methods tested in MARINA in other initiatives including stakeholders;
• Attract participants by sending invitations via e‐mail, followed by phone calls;
• Present the topic approached from the beginning of the workshop;
• Use methods for involving the active participation of the public by giving them the opportunity to express their opinions;
• Offer a clear explanation of the methodology used in order to be as clear as possible for the participants;
• Use methods that offer to the participants the opportunity to interact and to have open discussions;
• Explain the participatory method used to the participants as clearly and in a shorter time;
• Choose a familiar methodology for participants;
• Use a method that gives the opportunity to all participants to express their opinion;
• Explain at the start of the workshop the different phases that participants will go through;
• Make the workshops highly participatory and interactive;
• Give the participants sufficient time to present themselves and their work/field of interest, in order to facilitate connection and co-operation after the workshop;
• Plan an in-depth and varied engagement with stakeholders at all stages of the projects;
• Construct a good collaboration among project partners from the beginning of the project to its legacy to ensure a wider take-up of the results by all partners;
• Collaborate with your local partners, which can be great allies;
• Adapt the workshop methodology to the local culture;
• Assign participants to a specific table according to gender, type of organization/institution, type of expertise in the field, main interest in general to ensure multidisciplinarity;
• Multiply events where researchers from academia and industry exchange with a broader community to enhance this community and its visibility;
• Ensure that participants can exchange knowledge and meet new people;
• Look for participants open to dialogue, but who don't usually interact with each other;
• Start with a roundtable process so that everybody know each-other, and everyone can share their personal perspective of the subject;
• Empower all stakeholder groups to co-create sustainable value propositions that reflect societal needs and support healthy marine environments thanks to RRI dimensions;
• Hook RRI abstract subjects to a topic related to participants lives and has interests in it;
• Recruit participants by telephone to ensure a great effectiveness of recruitment;
• Adapt the workshop schedule and structure according to the specifics and program of the stakeholders you want to attend;
• Invite stakeholders to provide their feedback about workshop;
• Implement RRI in real situations, with many participants proposing many actions;
• Choose a suitable method for the number of participants and the specific of the workshop;
• Present and explain the method used;
• Engage stakeholders from different sectors of activity;
• Choose a method which will produce a large amount of data on a topic in a short time;
• Create the opportunity to network and discuss, in order to identify the key marine and societal challenges for the Wave Energy Sector;
• Stimulate and ensure open dialogue among the attendees;
• Plan the programme to encourage as much opportunity for interactions between participants;
• Identify and invite the right number of participants representing all necessary science fields to create a viable action plan. Participant recruiting is time-consuming and must be planned well in advance of the workshop;
• Engage participants via emails and phone calls, since it has been proven as the most effective means of recruitment;
• Be aware that it is challenging to persuade people to participate in workshops;
• Use both phone and email for citizen recruitment;
• Establish transparent, efficient and effective democratic mechanisms amongst all involved and throughout all the phases to create trust;
• Keep the workshop's duration short and engage an experienced facilitator;
• Involve politicians and municipality representatives in workshops to increase its effectiveness;
• Email and telephone were the best communication channels for promoting the workshop;
• Plan well the participant groups so that all stakeholders are sufficiently represented;
• Promote the workshop through websites and a poster campaigns;
• Bring people and particularly the young on location where they can have transformative experiences that they will seek to relieve throughout their lives;
• Engage young potential "citizen scientists" in schools to promote the issue at hand;
• Achieve positive engagement with all types of local stakeholders including relevant government agencies, local businesses, regulators, NGOs, CSOs, researchers and citizens;
• Explain clearly the workshop methodology and how the outputs will be used at the beginning of the workshop and include some warm-up activity;
• Choose well the workshop methodology to allow participants contribute to the discussion and to strengthen the links among them;
• Ensure the comfort of the room (space around the tables, temperature, light etc.) to reduce the stress and fatigue of the participants and to improve the results. Provide some small "gift" or surprise them somehow, to create a friendly environment for the discussion;
• Define a clear agenda and respect it, but do not hesitate to be flexible and modify the schedule to reach the final results;
• During the recruitment phase, ensure the methodology has been clearly explained and understood, to avoid misunderstanding during the event;
• Participants do not subscribe gladly to the platform, they don't have time and/or willingness to learn using another tool;
• During the recruitment phase, ensure the methodology has been clearly explained and understood, to avoid misunderstanding during the event;
• Ensure you have some big institution's newsletter to disseminate your workshop for recruitment and spreading of the results;
• Choose your methodology considering your audience;
• Dedicate the needed time to discuss and clarify the methodology and the agenda with the facilitator - and among the organizing group;
• Involve students when possible;
• Stream only the most crucial sections of the workshop, disseminate the streaming agenda;
• Provide a synthetic, max 5 pages, info pack about the topic before the workshop;
• During the recruitment phase, ensure the methodology has been clearly explained and understood, to avoid misunderstanding during the event;
• Send an official invitation letter signed by the director/president of the institute organizing the workshop to facilitate the recruitment;
• Apply different participatory methods during the event to maintain a high level of attention.

RRI Roadmap Milestone 4

• Ensure that all voices have an equal footing in the debate during the workshop;
• Request participants keep trying to think from other stakeholders' position;
• Allocate time for every participant to present his/her own idea and to discuss it in plenum;
• Find moderators with experience on methods used for event moderation;
• Try to approach of potential participants and their engagement in convergent discussions with the future topic of the event;
• Have proactive public participation from stakeholders, in particular from government and industry;
• Encourage and promote marine involvement for all stakeholders;
• Create a friendly and relaxed workshop atmosphere for participants to have lively and open discussions;
• Give tight bounds to participants about the shape of the contributions they have to provide, so they will not have other option than provide what is needed;
• Check the discussion and gently but firmly ask the participants not to lose focus on the final purpose, to speed up and keep up with the timing or not to go too deep or too specific;
• One day is not enough for SDD.

RRI Roadmap Milestone 5

• Define a clear plan for the future engagement of the workshop's participants to keep the community active;
• Check carefully the voting process of the actions, to avoid selfish or non correct behaviours which could distort the results;
• Translate workshop results in something short and friendly in short time and disseminate among the participants and others, not to loose momentum;
• Check carefully the voting process, to avoid selfish or improper behaviours, which could distort the results;
• Consider the RRI principles as guidelines to construct the project processes for a sound management of the projects;
• Achieve success through multi-stakeholder engagement and consensus;
• Ensure that the process of co-generating an action plan is concluded during the workshop;
• While interpreting the results consider the location of the workshop: statistically most of the participants will come from the area where the workshop is held;
• Consider the best way of collecting votes for the purpose such as the number of votes available for each participant, the rounds of votes, etc.

RRI Roadmap Milestone 6

• Facilitate collaboration between research and industry/market to create a dynamic knowledge-sharing mechanism;
• Convince investors to facilitate the creation of a dynamic knowledge-sharing mechanism;
• Develop a "Social and Solidarity Economy" type of framework in the field of marine biotechnologies;
• Build a network to report challenges to politicians to put marine biotechnologies on the national agenda as an economic and sustainable opportunity;
• Support local and international decision-makers in charge of evaluating if, when, how, by who and for what should Deep Sea Mining ever take place;
• Disseminate the results on MARINA platform;
• Create links among participants for future partnerships and develop a network of common interest;
• Offer open access to the specialized information and share knowledge;
• Send the final results of the workshop to the participants;
• Succeed with public engagement through science education and open access in policy;
• Science & Education and Open Access have a vital role in achieving success in the development of sustainable tourism ventures within Marine Protected Areas.

RRI Roadmap Milestone 7

• To measure success, define clear and achievable objectives;
• Develop new collaborations for new means of communication;
• Distinguish between occurrences and resources, in order to know what exists and its potential economic value;
• Involving customers ranked the most favourable cluster with specific actions including the adoption of the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) business model;
• The participants did not follow-up on the platform as they declared they were willing to do: there are too many platforms, they get lost or do not have time to explore another one.

RRI Roadmap Milestone 8

• Ensure that funding will be secured for action plan execution and follow up actions;
• Coordinate and develop industrial, academic and political linkages to boost funding around marine biotechnologies;
• Try to develop stronger engagement among schools and the local authorities for the maintenance of basic infrastructure;
• Attract private investments and develop national projects;
• Disseminate research and innovation outcomes that have societal relevance for ethical acceptability;
• Ethical issues are highly important in maintaining the sustainable operation of the vessels while safeguarding the environment;
• Facilitate fruitful discussions and widely disseminate conclusions to third parties;
• Ensure the policies are socially inclusive and are widely known;
• Push for governance and ethics to be required in business registration requirements for creating awareness on sustainability;
• Plan periodic meetings on the same topic, with old and new participants, to create ownership of the process, intensify the effort and ensure follow-up;
• Make ports hubs of sustainability.

See also...

Stakeholder Motivation