How to engage citizens? Well, a good start is to treat them like people

The second rule is to send forth those who wish to engage, to actually engage.

I recently began facilitating a process of participation in playground design for a local school community, with their local government. The "playground experts" deigned to let us (the community) into the process of making decisions about the design, but only if we travelled to them, met under their conditions, and so on. The very suggestion that we drag the experts from their tower to meet in the community, under the community's conditions, was anathema to the officers involved. Rule two corollary: engagement means meeting the other person on their terms.

This leads directly to Rule Three (perhaps the most important rule): Focus on building relationships before you try to engage with your issues. People don't want to hear your issues unless you've built a supportive relationship first. (Repeat after me "This is not…" etc).

What is needed - to finally reach a point - is a set of "structures" (they may not be - and in fact probably aren't - physical structures) that allows relationships to develop between the consulting and the consulted. These structures should be easily accessible by the citizen, convenient to them, local, small, informal, among other things; and the "consulting" should then concentrate on relationship-building for some time (allowing trust to develop) before seeking answers to pre-defined questions. The issue of trust is crucial - but that would need to be the subject of another column!

The point of "always-on" structures is exactly that: to allow for relationships, partnerships, collaboration, trust to develop before you ever try to "exploit" that relationship by seeking answers to your questions. Mind you, if you are in fact exploitative, then the relationship will be quickly over, and you won't achieve it again!

If you (allow the community to) design them right, these structures will be "owned and operated" by the community, and they will come to you for "engagement".

There is much to understand in the Zen of citizen engagement, grasshopper.