The development of an Internet forum for long-term participatory group learning about problems and solutions to sustainable urban water supply management

摘要

This paper reports on the planned use of the Internet in an ongoing participatory process targeted at developing solutions for the sustainable management of an urban water supply system. The foundation of our participatory methodology is face-to-face group communication within regular meetings of the principal stakeholders. During such meetings we are developing multi-media (paper-, boardgame- and computer-based) multi-agent models of the water management system in order to allow the stakeholders to explore possible management scenarios and to learn about other stakeholders' often conflicting perspectives and goals. However, another forum is required for stakeholder interaction, model testing and the exchange of views, outside of the necessarily rare platform meetings. A facilitated Internet forum is therefore under development. Since the stakeholder group contains a heterogeneous mix of people ranging from those experienced in using computers to those who are computer-naive and resistant to them, care must be taken when introducing a computer into the hitherto computer-free sessions. A multi-stage approach to introducing the Internet-based model into our participatory process through game playing and other acclimatization methods is being developed. This paper describes this approach and provides a planned architecture for the Internet forum.