Applying Online Community Engagement Lessons to In-Person Meetings

When COVID-19 closed offices and town halls, planners used breakout rooms, mute reminders, and emoji responses to create community discussions. Contrary to expectations, planners adapted and carried on, learning valuable lessons from the early days of lockdown.

In "Facilitating Online Participatory Planning During the COVID-19 Pandemic" (Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 90, No. 2) Dan Milz, Atul Pokharel, and Curt D. Gervich documented how planners and facilitators hosted online public meetings in the early months of the pandemic.

As community engagement transitions back to in-person, planners can draw inspiration from their experience hosting online meetings to inform face-to-face practices.

The authors found that planners were well-positioned to pivot online and experienced minimal disruption to their public-facing work. Their findings shared the many limitations of face-to-face meetings, and how community engagement methods are often structured and formalized with little to no opportunity for meaningful deliberation.

The study interviewed 32 planners from June to October 2020 to capture their experiences hosting public meetings. Using snowball sampling, respondents were selected from various public, nonprofit, and private settings specializing in public engagement.

Timing and Synchronicity

Many online tools replicate face-to-face meeting dynamics, such as sticky notes and flip charts, accessible continuously for planners to blend synchronous and asynchronous engagement. Between meetings, participants use these tools to share documents, videos, and comments, shifting synchronous sessions toward interactive group work.

This flexibility fosters collaboration beyond traditional meeting times, allowing contributions at convenience. Asynchronous tools complement synchronous interactions, facilitating ongoing dialogue and content sharing for optimized planning processes.

Interviewees noted that they began breaking longer meetings into processes spanning weeks or months. Instead of an eight-hour meeting, they might plan eight spread-out one-hour meetings. One interviewee organized small workgroups that collaborated between meetings.

Beauty Breaks

Informal interactions between participants often occur during break times in face-to-face community engagement sessions. Breaks also provide an opportunity to rest and reflect. However, online meetings have eliminated some crucial functions of breaks.

Planners devised strategies to recover losses. Methods included music breaks and one-on-one sessions. One interviewee described 'beauty breaks': "We announce a beauty break... turn off your camera, take a walk, return with something beautiful...When you turn your camera back on, hold up your beautiful object..."

Planners sought online proxies for the in-person experience of informal chats at the snack table and moments of respite outdoors. Rather than direct replacements, planners discovered novel methods to foster connection and contemplation during breaks.

The authors identify a limitation of the study: its focus on planners rather than participants, thereby overlooking attendees' perceptions of online meetings. The findings were also affected by the timing of interviews, potentially insufficient for detecting gradual changes.

The study found that interviewees integrated active participation into every online meeting due to concerns about participant disengagement. While participant-centered meeting approaches are not new to planning, the pandemic has widened planners' scope to apply these strategies more broadly.

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