Organizing and launching a consensus building process can be a daunting task, especially when there are a great many parties involved. The person convening the process must first determine whether there is a reasonable chance of succeeding. And because each conflict is different, and there are no hard-and-fast rules about when consensus building is likely to work, it is difficult to make this determination before the fact. If a consensus building effort seems likely to succeed, the convenor must ascertain who the stakeholders are and whether or not they will agree to participate. Decisions must also be made about how to frame the issues to be negotiated, how many meetings to hold, how to share the costs of the process, and so on. All of these determinations must be made carefully, because the ultimate success of every consensus building process depends on these early "design" decisions.