All persons potentially entrusted with a project or affected by a project may be considered for participation in a planning process using the OP-OD method. On the professional side, these will be representatives of all planning disciplines such as architecture, landscape/open space, load-bearing structures, residential building technology, structural physics, energy performance, fire protection, electrical engineering, accessibility, façades, life cycle, specific project-relevant techniques such as clay or wood construction, and sociology. On the expert side, they will include building owners, politicians or representatives of project-specific groups, and investors. Finally, the user side, depending on the type of building and use, will bring together residents, working people, tenants, and customers, as well as teachers and students and, on a case-by-case basis, possibly also representatives of neighbours.

Concrete examples and fictional cases can be found under the heading Real Fictions. These make the conceivable compositions of the OP-OD collective (depending on the planning task) more tangible.

The core of a method such as OP-OD is not suitable for demagogues, agitators or actors who always ‘want to lay the blame at someone else’s door’, or for those who only can, or even only want to work together under the threat of legal action. It requires a foundation of compromise and agreement in preamble to respectful collaboration. Hence the OP-OD method is not a naïve one. It makes it possible to deal with conflicts objectively on an equal footing and in a goal-oriented way, and to achieve solutions — even if (and especially so) not everyone shares the same opinion at the outset. However, since this is a description of the ambitions and desired benefits of OP-OD, it is by no means certain that these can be achieved in every use case. Hence the remaining weaknesses of the method and the difficulties it still faces are receiving the highest priority in the course of the underlying research; they can be found under ZukunftBau (Nah am Nutzen 1) and are also clearly evident in the external appraisals (Nah am Nutzen 2).