Issues such as the management of particular landscapes will involve a wider range of interest groups. Importantly, the process recognises the contextual nature of information. A supplied farm strategy that pertains to describe the optimal grazing regime for maximising stock weight-gain, for example, will always have been derived within a particular social, economic and ecological setting. Scientific results are similarly derived within a particular context, which will include factors such as scale, site and the researcher's personal worldview. Accordingly, the community dialogue process is designed to seek the active cooperation of participants in developing a common understanding of the context in which any individual piece of information becomes relevant.
Diversity is encouraged, rather than undervalued.
This makes it less likely that useful information will be dismissed out of hand, and acts to minimise unnecessary conflict over the value and relevance of information supplied by different sources. The outcome of these workshops is twofold. It provides those farmers who participated in the process with immediate access to new ideas and perspectives which may help them re-evaluate their current management practices. It also provides researchers with the resources necessary to develop a structured library of knowledge-based tools that is relevant to community needs, and is more likely to gain the acceptance of users. This comprehensive knowledge-base is designed to incorporate a wide range of experiential knowledge, expert systems, DSSs, software packages and databases, bringing together local and scientific knowledge systems characterised by their fragmentation.