Meeting protocols – Integration and Implementation Insights

A framework for navigating the impact of using artificial intelligence on collaborative research communication

March 24, 2026March 3, 2026

By Faye Miller.

faye-miller_2025 — Faye Miller (biography)

How can research teams recognise when their use of artificial intelligence is affecting their ability to integrate different knowledge and perspectives? How can they navigate the impact of artificial intelligence on their collaborative processes?

When research teams use artificial intelligence in collaborative work, new complexities emerge, especially subtle shifts in communication patterns that can fundamentally alter how teams integrate different perspectives and knowledge forms. Consider an environmental team relying on artificial intelligence summaries across hydrology, ecology, and policy. They might miss crucial disciplinary nuances, or follow its “evidence-based” recommendations that may clash with community priorities.

Lessons for transformative research from co-creating a conference without a fixed plan

November 27, 2025September 23, 2025

By Thomas Bruhn.

In developing a conference, what does it take for people to leave their comfort zones to co-design something new? What possibilities does this open up for more meaningful conference designs? What are the broader lessons for transformative research?

In 2023–2024, I worked with the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to develop a conference format for the German sustainability research community – something to help re-establish connection after the isolating COVID pandemic years, and to strengthen interdisciplinary exchange. The Ministry wanted something new and innovative.

Early in the conversation, I sensed hesitation when unconventional, interactive conference formats were suggested.

Planning transdisciplinary stakeholder workshops: Four practical lessons

May 13, 2025

By Maxine Fromm.

How can transdisciplinary researchers best organise workshops that create a collaborative space for different stakeholders? What practical planning is required? How can organisers meet the challenges of translating a project idea into concrete workshops?

This i2Insights contribution offers four practical lessons gathered throughout a dialogue series on a just industry transition between Dutch representatives from industry, non-governmental organisations, academia and ministries, which was organised by the Sustainable Industry Lab.

Lesson 1: Planning should start from your stakeholders’ needs

As Lisa Andrews and colleagues noted in their i2Insights contribution, Three lessons for mainstreaming transdisciplinarity, you need to ‘reach stakeholders where they are’ and take into account their knowledge levels, interests and agendas.

Structured dialogical design

July 10, 2024July 9, 2024

By Yiannis Laouris

How can heterogeneous groups reach consensus on complex issues in a reasonably limited amount of time? What kind of process allows for meaningful community involvement that is genuinely participatory and democratic?

Structured Dialogical Design is a process that achieves both these aims. The key aspects of the process and steps are presented.

Triggering questions

Structured Dialogical Design processes are always structured around triggering questions, which frame the discussions and help define the stakeholders of the issues under consideration. The idea is that those primarily concerned with and/or affected by the issues under consideration should become the primary participants.

For Structured Dialogical Design all stakeholders (or their representatives) concerned with the issues at stake must be included, including those seemingly without a voice (which many of us may not be hearing and are not responsive to listening to, such as the voice of nature).

Generating evidence using the Delphi method

July 8, 2024October 17, 2023

By Dmitry Khodyakov

What is Delphi? How has the Delphi method stood up over time? How can the best of Delphi be adapted to new circumstances and problems?

The Delphi method is a group-based process for eliciting and aggregating opinion on a topic with a goal of exploring the existence of consensus among a diverse group of handpicked experts. The Delphi method was developed at the RAND Corporation in the early 1950s to obtain a reliable expert consensus, which is often used as a substitute for empirical evidence when it does not exist.

The four key characteristics of the Delphi method are:

anonymity,
iterative data collection,
participant feedback, and
statistical determination of group response.

As a result, Delphi has become best practice for quantifying the results of group elicitation processes.

How to organize an “all-hands” meeting

March 10, 2025September 12, 2023

By Gemma Jiang, Diane Boghrat and Jenny Grabmeier

authors_emma-jiang_diane-boghrat_jenny-grabmeier — 1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Diane Boghrat (biography)
3. Jenny Grabmeier (biography)

What is an “all-hands” meeting? What’s required to assemble an effective planning team? What should the planning team consider in setting parameters for the meeting?

What is an “all-hands” meeting?

Here we consider all-hands meetings in the context of our experience with a large cross-disciplinary institute, where members are geographically distributed. An annual all-hands meeting is an effective mechanism many such organizations employ to bring all members together in person.

An all-hands meeting differs from a science conference in two main ways. First, its participants are identified members within the boundary of the organization. It is usually not open to a wider audience. Second, its topic areas extend beyond the research projects supported by the organization. Such topics can include strategic planning among leadership, community building among early career researchers, professional and interpersonal capacity building topics, and development of team science competency.

Making the Nominal Group Technique more accessible

September 5, 2023

By Jason Olsen

Looking to gain real insights from those with lived experience about a specific topic? Interested in a low-cost method that fosters equal participation and discussion over participant domination in a research focus group? Want to know about modifications to make pan-disability (ie., working with participants with different impairments) research focus groups more inclusive?

The Nominal Group Technique developed by Ven and Delbecq (1972) has been used for more than 50 years. Key to its success is the posing of a single unambiguous and unbiased question about a problem that can generate a wide range of answers. The process structures the meeting to enable critical dimensions of the question to be identified, ranked and rated in a way that:

limits the influence of the researcher leading the project, as well as the influence of attendees,
allows participants to clarify the question’s dimensions and gaps,
increases the likelihood of equal participation for all group members,
affords equal influence to different, and potentially conflicting, values and ideas.

An effective way to organize research coordination meetings

April 14, 2026March 21, 2023

By Gemma Jiang, Diane Boghrat and Jenny Grabmeier

How can large cross-disciplinary science institutes consisting of multiple teams working on multiple research projects overcome significant challenges to research coordination? Key aspects are:

Visibility: how to keep different project teams informed of each other’s progress?
Learning: how to support cross-project learning?
Accountability: how to keep project teams accountable for their goals and deliverables?

Tackling these challenges requires a combination of asynchronous communications such as Slack, newsletters and emails, as well as synchronous communications such as research coordination meetings.

Replacing conferences with effective online learning experiences

November 18, 2025October 4, 2022

By Maha Bali, George Station and Mia Zamora

authors_maha-bali_george-station_mia-zamora — 1. Maha Bali (biography)
2. George Station (biography)
3. Mia Zamora (biography)

What options are there for developing effective online replacements for face-to-face conferences? How can these options promote better access for those without funds or freedom to travel? How can they contribute to climate justice?

We share our experience in co-organising (with others) Equity Unbound’s inaugural Mid-Year Festival 2022, aka #MYFest22 (referred to throughout as MYFest), a virtual event that sought to center community and support, and avoid the many pitfalls of online, in-person and hybrid events.

Systems thinking in public policy: Making space to think differently

November 4, 2025September 20, 2022

By Catherine Hobbs

catherine-hobbs_2021 — Catherine Hobbs (biography)

Why does public policy go wrong? How can researchers who are systems thinkers begin to create the conditions in which those involved in public policy may flourish within their possible spheres of ‘horizontal’ influence?

The public policy context and why it goes wrong

Jake Chapman’s System Failure: Why Governments Must Learn to Think Differently (2002; 2004) remains a much-quoted report. In his second (2004) edition, however, Chapman reflects that, despite an enthusiastic reception, there had been “very little substantive shift in either policy or management styles within government” (2004: p.10). Chapman identified a number of difficulties, including:

Developing facilitation capacities in graduate students

August 7, 2024November 9, 2021

By Gemma Jiang and Robert Hacku

authors_gemma-jiang_robert-hacku — 1. Gemma Jiang (biography)
2. Robert Hacku (biography)

What does it take for graduate students to become good at facilitation? What skills do they need to learn and how can such skills best be imparted?

A facilitator is someone trained in the skill of shaping group dynamics and collective conversations. In cross-disciplinary research, thoughtful facilitation is necessary to enable effective interaction across disciplines and sectors.

We describe an apprentice facilitator program developed in a cross-disciplinary research team comprised of nine faculty and 15 graduate students from four academic institutes, representing six disciplines.

Five apprentices were selected from the graduate students on the team. The program was one semester long and took on average one hour per week.

Principles for welcoming all voices

April 3, 2024August 31, 2021

By Keith McCandless

author_keith-mccandless — Keith McCandless (biography)

Which principles would allow us to manage and lead groups that aspire to include all voices in shaping next steps and the future?

Liberating Structures is an approach to working together that puts innovative and facilitative power in the hands of everyone. It does this through 33 adaptable microstructures that allow groups of people of any size to be all-inclusive and to unleash everyone’s power.

Liberating Structures is based on ten principles that help guide choices and keep a community together while moving toward their set purpose.

Liberating Structures practice and principles come alive through active engagement. The path is co-evolving, iterative, and mutually shaped. As shown in the table below, each principle is couched as follows: When Liberating Structures are part of everyday interactions, it is possible to…

Each principle is accompanied by ‘Must Do’s’ and ‘Must Not Do’s’, also presented in the table below.