Lessons Learned per Public Engagement

• Moderate the workshop with an experienced facilitator to avoid "Groupthink" and the "Erroneous Priorities Effect";
• Establish cooperation among diverse stakeholders (researchers, innovative businesses, politicians and citizens) even when it's challenging;
• Make urban planning and tourism development collaborative and democratic by involving citizens and business in envisioning urban futures and resolve negative environmental impacts;
• Engage the public, involve governance bodies at various levels to generated ideas with ethical components, are sustainable, inclusive and of social justice;
• Joined stakeholder involvement produces ideas with integrated and holistic focus requiring synergy and collaboration;
• Follow-up with all participants with the results regularly and engage them in post-workshop knowledge sharing and networking through an online platform;
• Communicate broadly and raise wide awareness about the specific initiative to anchor change;
• Organise follow-up workshops by involving more decision makers to anchor change;
• Identify easy-to-implement solutions to attract people and harbour-related businesses in innovative harbour development;
• Develop attractive places dedicated for pop-up events hosted by harbour industries;
• Describe the workshop topic with clear and concrete examples of the subject using storyteling;
• Allocate sufficient time for discussions and to involve all participants interests and ideas;
• Identify common working initiatives between municipalities and the civil societies, so that citizens may be actively involved;
• Engage all nterested stakeholders in harbour development;
• Develop tools for engaging citizens in urban development and communicate them broadly to inspire local communities;
• Develop new models and ways of collaborating on climate change in order to create common knowledge and more awareness of climate change in public mind;
• Activate citizens as a resourceful group of action that could lead to a more innovative and including society;
• Use dialog for initiating collaboration among private landowners and municipalities;
• Allow different perspectives on the subject, which will lead to a common background for further discussion;
• Address a specific subject that concerns multidisciplinary stakeholders;
• Adapt the workshop schedule and structure according to the specifics and program of the stakeholders you want to attend;
• Encourage researchers to voice their opinions on marine issues in the media focusing on economic, environmental and social needs to enable the uptake of new technologies;
• Enable workshops participants to create networks and communities of interest to further research and identify solutions for the studied issue;
• Push participants to move beyond exchanging ideas and to start co-creating a vision;
• 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;
• Involve a multitude of stakeholders and implement actions as widely as possible, even globally, in order for adopted policies and solutions to be as relevant as possible, resulting in more support to implement the changes by all sides;
• Help participants become active in the workshop by helping them understand the importance of the Marine Hot Topic;
• Organise collaborative activities and tools to push RRI forward;
• Have participants trying to think from other stakeholders' position;
• Promote a greater participation of general public in projects financed by European funds to help filling the gap between science and society;
• Create decision-making processes that are participative, transparent and allow for public deliberation;
• Organize more science dissemination events targeting the general public;
• Promote citizen science to involve the general public on research;
• Develop more partnerships with the Media and NGOs in order to reach bigger audiences;
• Develop and organize more actions similar to this workshop, in order that different stakeholders meet and discuss their ideas more often and get used to think outside their boxes;
• Promote public engagement actions to raise awareness to the urgency of deep sea mapping;
• Bring researchers from ‘non-conventional’ areas related to Deep Sea Mining;
• Adopt participative methods tested in MARINA in other initiatives including 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;
• Create a relaxing but effective work experience and joint decision-making with the world café methodology;
• Follow up with the participants with periodic workshops using the same methodology;
• Foster collaboration among companies in the Marine Biotech value chain and social and environmental actors;
• Foster stakeholder engagement, capacity building, behavioural changes and production and consumption pattern shift with Science education
• Take actions in order to update the actual legislation;
• Attract participants by sending invitations via e‐mail, followed by phone calls;
• Increase awareness regarding water quality;
• Develop a partnership between different stakeholders;
• Develop a network of common interest;
• Create links between participants for future partnerships;
• Encouraged all the participants to work on all the solutions during the session;
• Use a method that encourages participants to work together in order to have an interactive group;
• Attract different stakeholders in order to have a homogeneity and complementarity of the group, to obtained complex inputs;
• Try to approach of potential participants and their engagement in convergent discussions with the future topic of the event;
• Consider a discussion phase that is long enough for all participants to be fully aware of all the implications of the proposed ideas without adding to much overall time to the duration of the workshop;
• Develop societal awareness about water and advantages of use of renewable energy sources in general and offshore wind farms in particular;
• Empower all stakeholder groups to co-create sustainable value propositions that reflect societal needs and sustain healthy marine environments thanks to RRI dimensions;
• Provide a good incentive / personal benefits to motivate people to attend the workshop;
• Remember that apart from being scientists, teachers, policy-makers, they are all citizens of coastal cities who want to care for the environment as a private person;
• Be inclusive in the words used so that non scientists participants can understand and contribute to the discussion without being overwhelmed by scientific language;
• Don't interfere too much with the topic which participants chose to focus on, it mostly depends on individual needs/experience and knowledge;
• Assign participants to a specific table according togender, type of organization/institution, type of expertise in the field, main interest in general to ensure multi-disciplinarity;
• Multiply events where researchers from academia and industry exchange with a broader community to enhance this community and its visibility;
• Coordinate and develop industrial, academic and political linkages to boost funding around marine biotech;
• Increase awareness in the youngest about the (local) marine issues to create a new generation of people that are aware of the problems and want to engage themselves, to take action also through a political career;
• Empower citizens beyond data collection, in decision making and governance;
• Use methods for involving the active participation of the public and giving them the opportunity to express their opinions;
• Mobilize stakeholders for active involvement;
• Engage stakeholders from different sectors of activity;
• The need for a good collaboration and interaction between civil society, policy makers, researchers, business sector and citizens, in all the Black Sea coastal countries;
• Engage participants to apply RRI principles in daily work and daily life;
• Choose a method which will produce a large amount of data on a topic in a short time;
• Give to all of the participants the opportunity to discuss and generate ideas;
• Try to obtain clear actions from people from different areas of interest, but with a common purpose;
• Present the topic approached from the beginning of the workshop;
• Invite and encourage different stakeholders to participate at this kind of workshops;
• Have proactive public participation from stakeholders, in particular from governance and industry;
• Encourage and promote marine involvement for all stakeholders;
• Develop a stakeholder engagement plan;
• Use both phone and email for citizen recruitment;
• Achieve success through multi-stakeholder engagement and consensus;
• Establish transparent, efficient and effective democratic mechanisms amongst all involved and throughout all the phases to create trust;
• Create a friendly and relaxed workshop atmosphere for participants to have lively and open discussions;
• Awareness and education are fundamental in changing mindsets;
• Be aware of the motivational factor that workshop participants may feel because they like the fact that an interdisciplinary group representing all society's niches is invited to brainstorming for resolving the problem;
• Involving customers ranked the most favourable cluster with specific actions including the adoption of the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) business model;
• Educate the public at large in their individual role in marine conservation and sustainability (Public Engagement, Science Education);
• Create a seafood producers organisation in France to reduce the gap between the producers and consumers;
• Ensure a good representation of professionals (industry related to the topic, policy makers, journalists) to have a balanced dialogue;
• Recruit participants by telephone to ensure a great effectiveness of recruitment;
• Define the date, finalise the hot topic and have communication material two months ahead;
• Connect all stakeholders through education and communication;
• Make an inventory of innovations and tools, and facilitate collaboration and networking for the development of biotechnologies in France;
• Equip urban open areas for open debates where local communities can meet frequently in order to exercise the rights guaranteed by Aahrus convention to develop sustainable decisions in a collective and legal manner;
• Inform in a wider manner all societal actors about the issue;
• Focus the workshop on a topic relevant for the participants and related to their daily lives;
• Hook RRI abstract subjects to a topic related to participants lives and interests;
• Look for participants open to dialogue, but who don't usually interact with each other;
• Use the SMART action format to ease the follow up of the workshop;
• Send a personalised invitation to ensures a better buy-in of targeted participants;
• Start with a roundtable process so that everybody knows each other, and everyone can share their personal perspective of the subject;
• Have participants rank the priorities and discuss from the highest to the lowest to co-construct a common vision;
• Put in place a multi-stakeholder dialogue to efficiently reduce plastic pollution;
• Develop messages that make the problem tangible for everybody for instance by translating facts and figures into something simple and impactful;
• Develop new tools and infrastructures of research on marine resources, particularly in inaccessible depths, but also for monitoring the marine environment, stocks of biomass or still unwanted algae;
• Ensure that all voices have an equal footing in the debate during the workshop;
• Make scientific information reliable and easily accessible to citizens and stakeholders;
• Attract private investment and develop national projects;
• Create the opportunity to network and discuss, in order to identify the key marine and societal challenges for the Wave Energy Sector;
• Involve all the interested stakeholders;
• Recruit participants based on their interest, research, business or private experience in Marine Spatial Planning MSP and or Offshore Energy;
• Stimulate and ensure open dialogue among the attendees;
• Develop a clear understanding around MSP and what its implications are for all stakeholders groups including offshore wind;
• Promote best practice cross-sectoral stakeholder engagement processes through webinars;
• Use of different communications platforms/technologies to communicate with stakeholders and make data accessible;
• Use new communications channels and IT technologies as opportunities to engage with communities;
• Develop webinars for cross-sectoral stakeholder engagement;
• Plan the programme to encourage as much opportunity for interactions between participants;
• Use methods that offer to the participants the opportunity to interact and to have open discussions;
• Explain the method used to the participants as clearly and in a shorter time;
• Offer an incentive for citizens in order to attract people to attend the workshop;
• Plan the stakeholders carefully to ensure that the right people, stakeholder groups and organisations are in the room;
• Bring people and particularly the young on the 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;
• Perform an analysis of publics' behaviours before engaging the public engagement;
• Use audience targeted communication for all types stakeholders that is engaging;
• Find a topic which will attract different stakeholders;
• Use a method that gives the opportunity to all of the participants to express their opinion;
• Use citizen observatories through mobile phones to report pollution sites and inappropriate environmental behaviour;
• Initiate target awareness campaigns towards all stakeholders through specific media campaigns;
• Provide Open Access to data for a proactive response to societal challenges;
• Develop information exchange systems between government, industry and the universities.

See also...

RRI Dimension