What happened during first Advisory Board meeting

What happened during WIMBY first Advisory Board meeting, which took place online on the 6th of October 2023? Find here below our short report.

AGENDA

10:30 – Welcome and tour de table
Technical Coordinator Stella Arapoglou | Vrije Universiteit Brussel
11:00 – Project introduction
Scientific Coordinator Luis Ramirez Camargo | Utrecht University
11:20 – Ice-breaking session on Miro board
Communication leader Rebecca Hueting | Deep Blue
12:00 – Feedback session
WP leaders and AB members
12:45 – Wrap up, Q&A and final remarks
Vrije Universiteit Brussel

EVENT REPORT

11:00 – Project introduction – Luis Ramirez Camargo UU

What are the WIMBY objectives and what have we reached so far?

Our scientific coordinator provided an insightful overview of the WIMBY project, setting the stage by highlighting the project’s context and the impact of the NIMBY (Not In My BackYard) effect on local communities. Delving into the challenges that has to be faced, he outlined the seven key objectives of the project, emphasising the work done during the first phase of the project: data collection and comprehensive studies encompassing environmental and social impact assessment. As we transition to the next phase, it’s time to translate our findings into action, embarking on the development of the WIMBY tools, especially the immersive 3D enviroment, the Web-GIS platform and the General Forum.

11:20 – Brainstorming/Ice-breaking session (Miro board)

Interactive board: the difficult participant – Rebecca Hueting DBL

All participants were invited to pick a blue dot and place it on the square text block on the type of “difficult participant” behaviour they think they might adopt with more probability, when participating to meetings where they feel uncomfortable (i.e. how do you behave when you become the “worst version of yourself” during a meeting?). Most participants admitted they tend to become “multitaskers”, reading emails, sending instant messages and not paying full attention to the activity. The second most chosen was the “impatient” behaviour, feeling uncomfortable with interactions and having the feeling of losing time.

On the other hand, when asked to place a red dot on the behaviours they aknowledge more often in meetings, the most common perception is that of interacting with participants who are either too “dominant” on others and make too long interventions, or with “withdrawn” participants who are not contributing to the discussion. As a final step, participants were asked to attempt mitigation strategies to ensure discussions can proceed more smoothly, addressing each “difficult participant” behaviour with specific strategic actions:

Multitaskers shall be kept involved with direct interactions, addressed directly and asked to share opinions, organising interactive sessions where participants are asked to keep smart phones and laptops away, or even using digital tools such as webex to label the “participant not paying attention” on the participants‘ list.
Domineering participants shall be handled by a stronger moderation attitude, guiding speakers and allocating an equal talking time to all participants.
Withdrawn participants can be better involved by creating more personal bonds prior the meeting, inviting and inciting them to share opinions directly and highlight their expertise publicly to encourage participation, ensuring other participants do not interrupt or take too much time for themselves.

Concerning additional strategies to foster collaboration, it is worth to mention:

Double checking facts and figures to win the resistance of those who challenge presenters and other participants or, calmly challenge them too to double check facts and bring the references to support the opinions that are brought to challenge in the specific moment.
Remind to cynical participants that everyone can and shall be given the possibility to contribute, that all views are welcome and valid in their differences.
Create space for hyperactive participants to hold side conversations that might be relevant, but risk to steal time to the whole group
Bring meandering participants back to the topic and repeat the objective of the meeting to funnel such “creative” energy towards common goals, with a tight time-keeping. Also, other creative activities might be encouraged/proposed.
Ignore those who constantly seek for attention and before starting the meeting, to avoid offensive or impolite remarks, moderators shalle clearly state the non-judgemental nature of such collaborative meetings, addressing whoever use inappropriate language or terms, to reformulate their thoughts and opinions without personal judgements.

The link to the Miro board will be kept open for input from all Advisory Board members until the end of November 2023, and visible until the third General Assembly which will take place in Wien on the 23rd and 24th of January 2024.

11:15 – WP Feedback session

WP1 – Physical and ecological bounding conditions – Andrea Hahmann DTU

We aim to reach various types of users, both local communities that want to check for their own environment, and organizations planning on implanting turbines. The tool needs to match both types of users’ habits.

How to articulate the Web GIS tool? Will the user be able to change configurations interactively? Adding a turbine, or changing the model for instance? The idea is to “pin a location to place a turbine and then get info about everything”.

Open questions:

What constraints for the layout optimisation
What are the relevant outputs for the user? Some examples are noise, species affected, landslide assessment, area around the wind farm affected
How to differentiate from a commercial tool?

WP2 – Modelling wind power in the social environment – Maeva Philippot VUB

Open questions:

What dataset would you recommend, where to go for further landscape metrics?
What parameters to optimise? What should we include in our impact assessment?

One AB member intervened, saying: The focus should be on environmental assessment. Indeed, the goal of natural areas is to protect bird species and maintain the landscape. There are very few studies on the environmental impact of wind power installations. We need to understand how to reduce this impact.

Do/can we try to show the jobs created locally? Displaced in other sectors? Decommissioning jobs?
For the morphological tool, we need input from several sites to identify the best practices. Are there any you would like to mention, that can be contacted or whose data is publicly available?
For the end-of-life treatment, how many and which scenarios would you like to be investigated?

WP3 – Societal engagement in pilot Cases – Christian Mikovits BOKU

We asked if we should include biased (already wind-power present, or wind-power plans declined) regions for the workshops. And another AB member answered: Yes, it would be interesting, especially in Portugal, to include one of each. One study case where wind power is already present and acceptation has started, and one where it is just arriving and everything is still to be done.

Now, we have two open questions:

Which target groups / stakeholders should we include / invite to the workshops?
How exactly can we minimize language-barrier effects during the workshops?

The local language should be used, but with some interactions in English, trying to minimise the language barrier.

WP4 – System analysis, best practice and trade-offs – Russel McKenna ETH

The first question asked was: “What different “types” of micro-level regions need to be considered in the typology / what are a region’s most important characteristics?”

They said that natural parks should be included because they constitute remote zones with large opportunities.

We also asked AB members what are the most important criteria/objectives (e.g., costs, emissions) to consider when linking the micro and macro levels. (e.g. land use, population density etc.)

They told us that if we investigate the definition of acceptance by local communities, we should include the political opinion. Election data and other strong drivers of acceptance (house ownership, etc) could be added to the model.

→ political data are available. Luis Ramirez Camargo will provide the dataset (UU).

→ link with the Renaissance Horizon Europe project (DBL), also look into trust levels on democracy/politics in national and regional statistics.

Finally, we considered how might insights from the pilot sites / regions be generalised and transferred to other areas and regions.

An AB member intervened: Some problems like local stakeholders’ involvement can be generalised but some others such as the law forbidding wind power installation are specific to Pantelleria island National Park.

WP5 – Mapping and assessing with interaction and dissemination tools – Luis Ramirez Camargo UU

We worked on the identification of the users of this tool. We asked to AB members if they have contacts that would be interested to collaborate with us as target user representatives (input needed for development of the interactive map).

An open question remained: “How to reach out for them?”

12:30 – 2nd Miro activity – General Forum feedback session

WP6 – Mapping and assessing with interaction and dissemination tools – Rebecca Hueting DBL

The image is a screenshot of the first online board frame representing a map of Europe where sticky notes have been added by participants, to provide feedback on the comment feature.

The second board frame was used to collect feedback on the contents that should appear when clicking on a specific comment on a map, to identify what is the priority and essential information to provide when end-users want to have a quick overview of comment details and more related information.

The third board frame was used to collect feedback on the structure and appearance of the main discussion platform, where the full list of comments is presented on separated lines and where sorting, filtering and searching options are made available.

12:50 – Wrap up and final remarks – Stella Arapoglou VUB

The final wrap-up ensured that all participants had the chance to speak out final remarks. The full coordination team mentioned upcoming activities, invited AB members to stay in contact and thanked all participants for their attention and valuable input.

13:00 – End of meeting

Written by: Rebecca Hueting and Marta Cecconi, Deep Blue srl

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