When Citizens and Officeholders Meet Part 2: A Typology of Face-to-Face Public Meetings

Abstract

This essay is the second in a two-part series that introduces a framework for differentiating among various face-to-face public meetings. The first piece identified key elements of public meetings pertaining to participants' roles, expectations of communicative influence and content, and prominent discursive genres. This second essay utilizes those elements to build a typology of seven general kinds of public meetings. These meeting types range from conventional forms-- with relatively simple goals of information expression-- to innovative models that enable collaborative problem solving between lay citizens and public officials. Each of the seven types are compared with one another and illustrated with examples. Using this framework, public participation theorists and practitioners can more readily understand the circumstances, purposes, and likely outcomes of any given public meeting.

Keywords: Deliberation, face-to-face meetings, communication, democratic participation