About The DESIRE Facilitator

DESIRE Facilitator

DESIRE facilitator is based on the open source software 'Facilitator'. DESIRE is an EU-funded research project within the 6th Framework Programme, see also www.desire-project.eu. Its aim is to mitigate desertification and remediate degraded land in 18 study sites around the world. The Centre for Development and Environment (CDE) of the University of Berne is leading one of the 6 working blocks, focusing on the assessment and selection of promising conservation strategies based on a close collaboration of scientists with local stakeholder groups. DESIRE facilitator is used to select and decide upon strategies for test implementation.

Below please find the original description by the software authors. Few adaptations and some debugging was made in March 2008 by CDE.

Software Description

This Multi Objective Decision Support System (MODSS) software uses decision rules, a hierarchical system for ranking criteria, score functions and linear programming to identify a preferred management option consistent with the ranking of the decision criteria. Assigning an importance order to the decision criteria overcomes in part the need to assign individual weights. The matrix framework of management options and decision criteria is generic and open, encouraging participation by all stakeholders and can accomodate measured data, simulation model results and expert opinions in the decision making process. The results can be viewed in one of two formats; bar and polar. Results in the bar format are displayed as horizontal bars with best and worst composite scores; the length of the bars representing the sensitivity of the resource management option to the individual ordering of the criteria. The polar format highlights, and groups, differences between best and worst composite scores. "What if" scenarios can be generated by reordering the decision criteria, selecting a different score function or by including additional options and criteria. The entire process can be exported to HTML allowing scenarios to be viewed from anywhere on the web.

Future Directions

Currently this software supports standalone operation both by a single person or as part of the facilitation process in a group scenario. In the future it will be provided in a multiuser version where groups of stakeholders can share and actively participate in scenarios from any location. Repositories will exist on the web (or locally) which stakeholders will use for synchronising their scenarios.

Programming Platform

This software is written entirely in platform independent Java. As a result it should run on any platform which supports the JDK/JRE 1.4 (or 1.5 / 1.6) environment.

Brief History

The Facilitator project was started in 1997. It has seen a number of iterations since then. Up until 2002 it was a proprietary application used in house. It is now open source :)

The project page for the Facilitator is:

This software is based on research from: This software was designed and built by: Funding sources for this project included:

March 2008