Facilitation patterns and citizen engagement

This paper is concerned with the problem of engaging citizens in decision making and with the nature of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) required to support geographically dispersed citizen groups. The authors draw upon work within the field of collaboration engineering that has identified patterns in collaboration processes and has used these to underpin ICT support. The authors argue that where citizens have a stake in the outcome of a decision, there are likely to be problems arising from their social and emotional involvement, leading, for example, to internal conflicts or attempts to dominate the group. The paper posits that it is also possible to identify patterns in these more social aspects of collaboration and proposes a facilitation intervention pattern that can be used to underpin requirements for ICT support. The facilitation intervention pattern is important because it will enable a wider range of people to act as facilitators by embodying the knowledge and experience of professional facilitators within the support tools. Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.