In partnership with the national Fire Adapted Communities Learning Network (FAC NET) we established a Stakeholder Advisory Council (SAC) comprised of 20 individuals affiliated with federal, state, and local agencies, real estate development, public safety and emergency response, and non-profit organizations in central Oregon.
In 2021, the SAC engaged in three virtual workshops guided by FAC NET facilitators and FireNet researchers. The initial council efforts focused on producing and refining a set of focal management motifs, which will function as formal hypotheses during later research analyses.
Dialogue was structured using a variety of approaches, including role-playing scenarios and interaction with SNIP model outputs. After each of our three SAC workshops we completed a 2-page summary synthesis and summary report. SAC meeting reports cover issues including how risk managers play different types of roles in the wildfire risk management network, their influence over the network, the structure and nature of the Central Oregon wildfire risk management network, and adaptive learning, respectively.
The lessons learned from the SAC are guiding our development of the SNIP social network model. In this way, we are melding a mathematical model capable of simulating influence propagation through an actor network with the lived experience of people directly engaged in wildfire mitigation and risk management.
Stakeholder Engagement History
In June 2020, we hosted a virtual workshop “Adapting to Wildfire”, attended by over 30 participants. The workshop was originally scheduled as an in-person event for the Central Oregon Fire Science Symposium (COFSS), sponsored by the Northwest Fire Science Consortium, and scheduled to be held in Bend, Oregon on March 19, 2020. When the conference was cancelled due to COVID-19, we redeveloped the workshop for an online, participatory format and expanded workshop recruitment beyond COFSS registrants.
This workshop was our first effort to engage a diverse set of wildfire managers in a guided, participatory discussion where we could begin to explore their shared experiences in wildfire management, and, in particular, whether our abstract conceptions of wildfire management networks resonated with their lived experience. We produced a set of introductory materials for this workshop including the first draft of a social influence network grammar. When the conference was abruptly cancelled due to COVID-19, we redeveloped the workshop for an online, participatory format and expanded our workshop recruitment beyond COFSS registrants.