The Citizen Science Toolbox (at https://app.secure.griffith.edu.au/03/toolbox/) is a free resource of over 60 principles and strategies to enhance meaningful stakeholder involvement in Decision Making. Stakeholders include not only communities, but also scientists and decision-makers. Meaningful involvement of all stakeholders occurs through a commitment to social learning - learning on the part of communities, other stakeholders and institutions.

It's a part of the website of the Cooperative Research Centre for Coastal Zone, Estuary and Waterway Management - aka Coastal CRC - which provides decision-making tools and knowledge necessary for the effective management and ecosystem health of coastal zones, estuaries and waterways. They have given permission to us to copy the content of the 60+ pages here where we can easily keep them up to date, add our own comments and experiences, and link them into the larger documentation and conversation of this wiki.

Please help out with the copying - contact John Abbe and i'll send you some of the plain text files that still need to be copied here. Here's the checklist for adding the new pages:

Look over the list on Participatory Processes. Choose an item that has a "?" after it but no asterisk. Click on the "?"

The new empty Wiki page will appear with a big empty box where you can put the contents of the comparable Citizen Science Toolbox page.

Copy the text from the corresponding text file and paste it into the big text box.

Click the Preview button. Then, open the corresponding page from the original Citizens Science Toolbox in a separate browser window (the list: http://www.coastal.crc.org.au/toolbox/alpha-list.asp). Compare the two pages and make any needed fixes or formatting. In particular there are sometimes sub-levels of bulleting - use two or more asterisks at the beginning of a line to make sub-levels. Numbering has been replaced with regular bullet; if numbering seems better to you, change it back (use # instead of *).

You may see references to case studies; please replace them with something that explicitly refers to a Wiki page. For example, the original Backcasting page said, "see Case Study Community Fair" so on our Backcasting page i wrote, "see the case study linked at the bottom of the Community Fair page"

I've also been letting the webmaster of the Citizen Science Toolbix, James Whelan (mailto:james.whelan@griffith.edu.au), know of any problems on their original pages.

Other things you can do (these apply all the time, not just when you're adding these pages):

Fix spelling or grammar errors. If you see other ways to improve the text, e.g. for clarity or to remove redundancies, go ahead.

Edit words to make them Wiki Case wherever it seems appropriate. Individual words that you believe merit their own page (e.g. facilitator) can be enclosed with double-parenthesis [[]] to make them into links. Likely candidates include names of organizations involved in dialogue and deliberation, and names of other practices (e.g. on Open Space one might mention that Wiki Wiki is a similar on-line practice).

You can check the links to see if they work and, if they don't, either delete them or, preferably, do some web-searches to figure out a new URL for that information or reference.