By Sondoss Elsawah, Elena Bakhanova, Raimo P. Hämäläinen and Alexey Voinov

2. Elena Bakhanova (biography)
3. Raimo P. Hämäläinen (biography)
4. Alexey Voinov (biography)
What knowledge and skills do individuals and teams need to be effective at participatory modeling?
We suggest that five core competency areas are essential for participatory modeling:
- systems thinking
- modeling
- group facilitation
- project management and leadership
- operating in the virtual space.
These are illustrated in the figure below.
These competency areas have naturally overlapping elements and should therefore be seen as a holistic and interdependent set. Further, while certain competencies such as modeling skills can be addressed by individual members of a participatory modeling team, the entire process is a team effort and it is necessary to also consider the competencies as a group skill.