I have observed a couple of things during this consultation:
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Summaries have been useful to me to catch up when many topics were discussed in a single day. The summary of yet-untouched-topics was good as well to get some focus.
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Covid-19 has been a factor that altered people’s agendas and availability/ability to contribute. One way to deal with this may be to extend the consultation period, but that would not necessarily bring more contributions. I guess it would be worth if we could sense some commitment from key people to get engaged during the X following days.
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The efforts of translations have not rendered significantly increased participation of the target communities (null in the ES case). However, the respective posts have had a considerable amount of views, though not able to see if those where from the coordination team or others already contributing to the EN threads.
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There have been less contributions than I expected from members of key communities across the world. Yet again, many threads had a lot of views.
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The previous two may suggest that people is interested and reading the posts, and maybe agreeing to what has been said, but upon agreement they may feel there’s not much more they could add.
For future consultations, some potential actions could be:
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Increase social media promotion of the consultation. There is a risk of pestering people, but I think the gain is worth the risk.
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Consider not everyone uses the same channels, nor with the same frequency.
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Have a list of potential venues to promote through from the offset (listserves, FB pages/groups, etc.) and to the extent possible automate posts/messages on those to lower the burden on the coordination team - (maybe this was done by the coordination team).
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Highlight more the value of everyone’s contributions, perhaps in a more personal way “we need your input and expertise”.
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Highlight more the benefits of participating (truly my thinking here is “if you don’t participate, don’t complain later”, but I recognize it needs to be more diplomatic).
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Highlight the deadline.
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Encourage the use of “likes”. In the cases where people feel they don’t have much to add to what has already been said, this could provide a better grasp on which ideas are shared by many people, as opposed to just proposed by someone in particular.
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Using GBIF Discourse. This is a great resource. But some people may not have participated in it before, don’t know how it works, and that could be a discouraging factor. Maybe include in the promotional messages that “you just need a free user account”, or “just log in and participate”, or the like.