Re: EPA Dialogue Summary: Outreach (July 11)

[John Stone <jvstone@umd.umich.edu>]

Hi Sally. Thanks again for the tremendous amount of work you've done in
pulling together the daily summaries. It is with the utmost respect for your
effort that I would like to offer one observation on your most recent
summary, the one concerning the topic "outreach," from July 11.

The first summary under the heading "How EPA should identify interested and
potentially affected parties" failed to mention that ethnography not only
has been suggested, but has been practically demonstrated as an effective
means of locally-driven population identification and population-specific
issue documentation. Perhaps this was simply an oversight given the extreme
volume of information to be summarized.

I'm a bit partial to that point, though, as I took time off from work to
emphatically pour my heart and soul into describing the conceptual and
methodological foundations of the ethnographic approach to
outreach/participation, as well as directing the readers to sources where
they can learn more about the approach should they wish to use it. Then, to
see that it wasn't even listed among the "Suggestions and resources for
identifying stakeholders" section of the summary was a bit disheartening to
say the least. I should note, though, that the summary did make mention of
the development of a "participatory equity principle," although again not in
the context of ethnographic outreach/participation from which the principle
originally derived.

I would greatly appreciate it if you were able to add this as an addendum to
the "outreach" summary, or if it could be made more explicit in the final
report of the on-line discussion.

Again, I greatly appreciate your effort in pulling together these summaries,
and I hope my comment above is taken in the respectful manner in which it
was intended.

Cheers,

jvs