Guidelines A-Z Resources Easy answers Faced with ideas like levels of participation, different phases and roles you may be tempted by some quick fixes for your participation problems. These can bring their own difficulties. It is difficult to know how to pitch a presentation. It is very difficult to keep to a fixed agenda - people may bring up any issue they chose and you just look authoritarian if you try and shut them up.
Few people get a chance to have a say.
Run workshop sessions for different interest groups. Bring people together after the workshop sessions in a report-back seminar. By then everyone should have some ideas in common. If you must do a one-off meeting, split people into small groups early on and run a report back in the second half. Make clear in all publicity that it is an ideas session with group discussion.