• Project Wikis

These are wikis dedicated to a particular IF Discussion Project about an area of emerging social and political concern. During the course of a project the project facilitator might set up a “private” wiki for each discussion panel for the sharing of that panel’s developmental thinking. Prior to the joint panel discussions, only the members of a given panel would be able to view and edit the project material. Once the project panels are ready to share their ideas as a joint panel, the wiki can be made publicly viewable–but with writing or posting privileges restricted to the project panelists. Currently the Towns and Cities Wiki (for the joint panel sessions of “Shaping our Towns and Cities” project) is set up this way. Once the project panelists are ready to turn over their material for public discussion, then the wiki can be set up as a fully “public” wiki where anyone online could view, edit, and add to the material. The Future of the Family Wiki is an example of such a public wiki. This wiki is open for the contributions of anyone who is interested in building upon the ideas that emerged from the project discussions. We ask only that contributors engage with this material in the same generosity of spirit that guided the creation of this material from the beginning. This means that people are invited to make revisions that help to clarify for expand upon the ideas present here. Anyone can add new policy ideas to the wiki as well. But, we ask that people not delete or undermine ideas with which they disagree. Our purpose is to expand the range of policy ideas people might think about–regardless of whether any of us approves of these ideas.

• Guide Wikis

These are wikis dedicated to offering guidance to anyone who might want to engage in some aspect of what the Interactivity Foundation does in any of its three focal areas (IF’s project discussions, the public discussions that are based on those project discussions, and the use of IF’s discussion approach in educational settings). Guide wikis offer the opportunity for users or practitioners to share the wisdom gained from their particular experiences by editing, revising, or generating new material to help others. The Student Guide Wiki, for example, focuses on offering guidance from a student perspective on our student-centered discussion process. It started with entries from Jack Byrd at IF, but is being edited and augmented by students who have worked through these lessons first-hand. We will likely develop a similar wiki from a faculty perspective as well. We are also planning to add an Academic Success Wiki, to share guidance about how to be a successful student more generally (in a way not limited to using IF’s collaborative discussion model). Such wikis can be a powerful tool to enable people to share their experiential know-how with others.

• Internal Development Wikis

As we continually expand and develop our own thinking as an organization about what we do and how we do it, we’ll undoubtedly develop any number of wikis on these various topics. These are likely going to be primarily of internal relevance to IF in the near term. But they may be of interest to those who are interested in exploring more of the thinking behind the Interactivity Foundation. Some of these wikis will show up as publicly viewable.

We hope these wikis will be a helpful way for you to interact with the ideas that shape the work we do and that emerge from the work we do.

–Jeff Prudhomme

When we think of policies in this way, we move policy discussion from province of technocrats to the everyday realm of democratic citizens. Of course, in an IF project we’re not talking about telling the sort of detailed stories you might find in a novel or even a short story. We’re talking about providing a basic storyline for the public actions that might be taken by our society in dealing with an area of public concern. That’s what we have in mind with calling these “conceptual” policies—we’re focusing on the basic storyline, not nuanced plot details. Such a storyline might tell essentially who would do what—and why—letting us know the motivations for the actions and the thinking or values behind them.

Setting out a basic storyline like this can help to make clear the orientation our society might take toward an area of concern. A story presents for our consideration a way of being, a way of orienting ourselves to possibilities. If we think of describing policy possibilities in this way, we might find it easier to leap into the task of imagining them. And once they’ve been generated, we might also find it easier to share them with others, if we approach them as essentially different stories our society might tell.

To participate in a debate is to compete—to try to win an argument and defeat an opponent’s position. To participate in improvisation is to serve—to try to generate something new by sharing with others. Colbert talks about this in his recent Northwestern University commencement speech:

Now there are very few rules to improvisation, but one of the things that I was taught early on is that you are not the most important person in the scene. Everybody else is. And if they are the most important people in the scene, you will naturally pay attention to them and serve them. But the good news is that you’re in the scene too. So hopefully to them you’re the most important person, and they will serve you. No one is leading, you’re all following the follower, serving the servant. You cannot win improv.

And, I would add, you cannot “win” an Interactivity Foundation discussion. But if you participate as if your discussion partners are the most important persons in the room, you’ll pay more attention to the ideas they bring up and you’ll try to help flesh them out and develop them. And if everyone is serving each other like this, the result will be new ideas coming into the discussion, perhaps ideas that no one individual had fully foreseen.

Colbert says, “life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along.” Making things up may sound like something fake or childish, like you’re just playing. But play can be serious and the means of creation. It can mean making something new, generating something, bringing something to be that wasn’t there before. And that’s what we’re after in an Interactivity Foundation discussion. Like improv we’re interested in creating something new, rather than knocking something down, as in a debate.

So if you’re wondering about how to participate in, or even facilitate, an Interactivity Foundation discussion, think about how you can serve the others in the discussion. Think of each other as the most important persons in the room. By paying attention to each other, following and playing with each other in this way, you’ll be on the way to building something together, creating something new.

For the closing segment of Colbert’s speech (though the whole thing is worth watching), check here: Closing Segment of Colbert\’s Commencement Speech 2011

–Jeff Prudhomme

The exploration of consequences can also help a panel to uncover deeper conceptual connections among the various possibilities they’ve developed. Sometimes when a group is looking through the lens of a given policy approach, they realize that the world they’re describing basically matches what they described with a different possibility. The panelists might realize that what appeared to be two or three distinct policy approaches, actually amount to the same basic policy approach, embodying the same philosophy of action. What initially appeared to be two or three different policies could be rewritten as one, perhaps at a deeper conceptual level.

This very thing happened in recent project discussion. I won’t go into the topic, since it’s part of a current sanctuary discussion. But it was interesting for all of us to see the lights go on during the meeting. We had just worked through the consequences for one possibility and had started in on the next, when someone remarked, “these seem to be the same consequences as we were just discussing.” Someone else responded, “it seems like these policy ideas are basically getting at the same thing, so maybe there’s some way to combine them.” A half hour later there were similar observations about a third possibility. We ended up the session with a sense of how these three possibilities could be combined—and with a sense of how the new unified possibility could be presented in more conceptual terms.

–Jeff Prudhomme

In the Helping America Talk project on civic discourse, the panelists developed a couple of policy ideas that relied on the broad notion of incentives and disincentives. One policy idea relied on the supposition that the quality of public deliberation could be improved if the participants faced the prospect of gaining or losing something based on the quality of the ideas they brought forward. If the ideas they contributed to the public discussion turned out to be genuinely useful, then there ought to be the prospect of some kind of reward. The panelists brought up the notion of a financial reward, but they also talked about the importance of social recognition. They pointed out that reputation tracking systems (such as one finds in online social networks) could be one means of fostering this sort of accountable public thinking with the prospect of social acclaim as a reward for “being right” or thinking well, or a loss of social status as a penalty for “being wrong.”

At the time, more than a few of the panelists thought these ideas, especially of non-financial incentives, might not go over very well in subsequent citizen discussions. They worried that their fellow citizens might see this approach as unrealistic. But a recent public radio story, “Gamifying the system to create better behavior,” indicates their incentive ideas might have been on the right track. The story recounts how Sweden has set up a successful positive reinforcement program to encourage safe driving. They have speed cameras that catch speeding automobiles, but the non-speeders are also caught being good: for safe driving your tag number is put into a lottery to win a portion of the fines paid by the speeders.

This sort of “game playing” approach, or “gamification,” is intended to help people engage in civic space as active and thoughtful problem solvers, just as they’d engage in a game. The  incentives need not be primarily financial—and not even financial at all.  Gabe Zicherman, who has written on this gamification approach in marketing, uses the acronym “SAPS” to explain the hierarchy of incentives to which people respond:

SAPS stands for Status, Access, Power and Stuff. Zichermann says those are things people want in their lives as rewards — in that order. “It turns out,” he says, “that cash isn’t that good of a reward. Status is a fantastic motivator for getting people to do stuff.”

So the next time Interactivity Foundation discussion panelists start thinking of policies with incentives and disincentives, that’s a good time to remember the value of positive reinforcements rather than just negative ones. And it’s a good time to remember that it’s not all about the money. It turns out that money, or material reward, is likely not the most powerful motivator for civic behavior. It’s a good time to encourage panelists to think broadly about what might really motivate us as democratic citizens to act in certain ways.

–Jeff Prudhomme

The dangers of influence.  The Columbia Mission Management Team had members in positions of greater authority who exerted influence over the deliberations of others. In the actual working of their group, a person in a position of authority would express a strong position and then ask for others to respond. This preliminary expression of authority essentially closed off the exploration of alternative possibilities. Technically speaking, Interactivity Foundation discussion panels don’t have members with authority over others. However, some participants, perhaps by sheer force of personality or by speaking from knowledge on a given topic, can accrue authority within the group. This isn’t bad in and of itself. However, discussion panels need to be wary about the tendency of such expressions of authority to shut down or close off the group’s explorations.  It’s important for outspoken panelists to be sensitive about their behavior and how it can preemptively close off the discussions—and how this can lead a group to think poorly.

The need to embrace diversity and dissent. The Columbia Mission Management Team failed in part because they stressed the need for consensus. The group essentially started with a set conclusion—that even if there was a problem (from a missing panel during the launch), there was nothing that could be done about it (a mistaken assumption). This meant the Mission Management Team shut down contrasting points of view, since the main task was just to establish and reinforce consensus for this position. This stymied the ability of others in the group to come up contrasting possibilities of what could be done before Columbia tried to land (it broke up on re-entry). Our discussion panels similarly need to embrace dissent and divergent perspectives in order to open up their group exploration of useful and contrasting policy possibilities—regardless of whether these possibilities are perceived as a matter of popular consensus.  Further, the panels need to be careful to keep an open mind rather than starting with a preconceived limitation about what is or isn’t possible.

Of course, the life-and-death consequences of the Columbia disaster is a stark contrast to the low risk endeavor of an Interactivity Foundation sanctuary discussion project. It’s a good reminder, however, of what it takes for the groups in our projects to think well.

I found a recent example of this in Atul Gawande’s account of different programs designed to slow the accelerating costs of healthcare. Gawande’s New Yorker article, ”The Hot Spotters: Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care?,” recounts efforts to address the so-called “hot spots” of small numbers of very needy patients who generate a lion’s share of costs. In one case he describes, the health plan designers decided to increase co-pays for individuals as the way to reduce costs—reasoning that patients might slow their use of healthcare services if they had to bear a greater portion of the costs. This is a fairly common line of reasoning nowadays. It appeals to the notion of greater individual accountability for one’s own healthcare expenditures. If you have to pay a greater share of the costs, then you’ll think twice about whether you really need to go to the doctor. Makes sense, right? Yet in the case described by Gawande, costs continued to rise just as fast as before. It turns out that by shifting a greater cost burden to some of the most at-risk patients, especially retirees living on a fixed income, this led those patients to cut back on their medications and other services. By failing to keep up with more routine care or regular medication, the patients’ health degenerated and they ended up needing far more costly care.

The purpose of sharing a story like this with an IF panel is not to criticize a given policy approach. It’s to encourage the panelists to think about the different human situations that a policy might feed into. It’s to help them imagine how the policy might unfold differently for different groups of people, a reminder that we need to think beyond ourselves and how we might act. It’s to help us remember that consequences often unfold in ways we don’t intend. Often we have set beliefs about social realities or human behavior and we imagine things might simply evolve as we’d plan or predict. Having some examples of unexpected consequences, especially examples drawn from outside the topical area of a given project, can help to enrich panelists’ exploration of consequences.

–Jeff Prudhomme

Playing around with these different metaphors also can serve as a kind of imaginative warm-up for generative thinking. Often it’s hard for panelists to shift from thinking analytically in terms of exploring an area of policy concern to thinking generatively in terms of creating diverse policy responses to that area of concern. By engaging their imaginations in this way, panelists might find it easier to make connections and begin to construct policy possibilities that embody divergent visions of the policy area.

One way to get panelists moving in this direction is to have them generate a list of possible metaphors or analogies that express what an area of concern could represent or mean. In some cases this might work in regard to the whole topic or area of concern under discussion. For example, with the Genetics Technology project, panelists focused on generating metaphors for these technologies. With the project on the Future of the Family, the panelists generated different metaphors for “family” or what family might represent for society. With other topics, where the topic is more diffuse, it might work to focus on some key aspects of the policy area. For example, in the project on Civic Discourse (Helping America Talk), some of the metaphors focused on the phenomenon of discourse itself—exploring different visions of what the interchange of public discourse might mean. Other metaphors focused more on the content of that interchange, exploring, for example, different ways to think about what “information” or “knowledge” could mean (that is, the information that citizens might need to make informed democratic decisions).

One part of this exercise is for panelists to focus on generating a multiplicity of different metaphors. They can think of this as asking themselves, “What are different ways to convey what this topic represents?” or “What are different ways to picture the way this topic (or this reality) functions in our society?” It’s important for panelists not to get stuck on just one motif. Exploring different metaphors like this can help panelists avoid just thinking of one basic vision of the policy area (and what it represents) and then sketching out binary opposites in terms of policy approaches toward it.

Another part of this exercise is for panelists to explore how a given metaphor can lead to sketching out very different policy implications.  At first this may seem counter-intuitive. For example, with the Genetic Technology project, one of the most prominent metaphors was to think of these technologies as “playing God.” It seemed obvious, at first, to most panelists that the policy implication of this was to say that “playing God” is a bad thing to do—so the policy should be to prohibit or greatly restrict these technologies. Upon reflection, however, others pointed out that from another perspective people might feel called upon to be “god-like”—so “playing God” should be something we do. The policy implication of this would be to throw ourselves whole-heartedly into the development and use of these technologies. Similarly, in the Civic Discourse project, the metaphorics of “information as power” led to some policy notions of expanding participation in that power (universalize and expedite access to information, so the power is shared more equally in a democratic society)—and some policy notions that sought to consolidate or restrict that access to that power (restrict access to information to allow the government to govern more efficiently).  With every metaphor that comes up, panelists can almost always discover different ways to unfold the metaphor from the standpoint of different perspectives, perspectives they’ve likely uncovered in their earlier discussions.

To get panelists started, I’ve often found it helpful to bring up some metaphors from policy areas other than their own. This usually gets them moving. It gets them thinking about the big picture of what this area of concern (or some aspect of it) could mean. Once they get moving, the panelists can usually generate a lot of different metaphors, which in turn serve as a rich starting point for generating a diverse range of policy possibilities. If panelists try this out, they’ll likely find that playing around with these metaphors can give them a good start toward generating a number of contrasting policy approaches.

–Jeff Prudhomme

I’m not sure whether or how this might be possible. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a Bob Edward’s interview of legendary music producer Quincy Jones (from Edward’s XM show on 11-20-2008; the quotations below are my rough transcription). In the interview Jones talks about his creative collaboration in producing Michael Jackson’s mega-hit Thriller album, the best selling album of all time. Jones says that at the time that he had no idea of how good the album or any of the songs might be:

“Who knew what was coming with Thriller? You can’t guess that, you just have to do the best you can. Try to get your own goose bumps.”

Jones tells how they worked down from 800 possible songs to 12. Eventually it was set that there would be 9 songs on the album. But how would these decisions be made? Could the selection process be generative and not just subtractive? For Jones, it was clear that it would not be a matter market research. That would lead them astray:

“I think when you start chasing demographics and focus groups and all that kind of stuff, you get in a lot of trouble.”

Instead, once they got down to 9 songs, Jones played what he calls a little trick, asking:

“Out of these 9, which do you think are the weakest—the 4 weakest? Irregardless. And after you make that decision, you go back in to try to make 4 more that were stronger than anything else on the album. That’s always worked for me really well, because you turn the album upside-down, when you take out the 4 weakest and try to make them the 4 strongest. And, um, that’s always been a good luck charm for me. And we tried it and it worked.”

As a result Thriller ended up adding 4 songs that went on to become top singles in their own right, “P.Y.T.,” “Human Nature,” “Lady in My Life,” and “Beat It,” and, of course the album went on to become the top-seller of all time.

Could something like this little trick work during the facilitation of IF Sanctuary Projects? Could it be a good luck charm for panelists, helping them to be bold in the ways they make choices to exclude some possibilities and augment others? Could it be a spur to the discovery of new and more powerful policy ideas that might make their work even better? A lot will depend on the situation. And as Jones says, we won’t know in advance. We’ll just have to do the best we can and try to get our own goose bumps.

–Jeff Prudhomme

You can think of “concepts” as the handles with which we grab hold of the world. Different concepts give us a different grip on reality and help us deal with it in different ways. You might think that a conceptual discussion has to be an abstract one, one that leads away from reality into a fog of empty or confusing ideas. But we’re thinking of concepts in a different way. Concepts can give us a way to penetrate to the heart of a matter—to expose the fundamental issues at question. By engaging people in a discussion of conceptual policy possibilities, we hope to enable citizens to penetrate to the heart of the matter. We want to give them the chance to try out different “handles” or “grips” by which we, as democratic citizens, might take hold of some area of our communal or social lives. We want to give people an opportunity to get down to the basic matters at root in the discussion without getting hung up in a lot of specific details about how a policy might be implemented.

Here’s a fairly recent illustration of what this could look like. In a Fresh Air interview about her book, The Three Trillion Dollar War (co-authored with Joseph Stiglitz), scholar Linda Bilmes talked about the US policy toward Iraq War veterans.  Her comments were focused on care for injured veterans and how our policy at that time not only made it difficult for many of them to receive needed support but also added unnecessary administrative expenses.  Bilmes went on to describe what we could call two different conceptual policy possibilities. The first possibility, embodied by our policy at the time, essentially asks, “How can we make sure that Iraq War veterans don’t get a penny more than they deserve?” According to this policy idea, the chief responsibility of government in regard to veterans is to make sure that no one undeserving gets assistance. The burden is on vets to prove that they deserve a certain level of support.  A second conceptual policy could be summarized as asking, “How do we make sure that our veterans get all the help they need to return to civilian life?” The chief focus of government would be to make sure veterans get what they need when they come back home.

Keep in mind that citizens could discuss each of these conceptual policy possibilities without needing to master complex details of various administrative programs.  Citizens could explore the basic ideas of each—and sketch out how each would lead to different programmatic consequences. The default in the first case is to assume that vets are undeserving of support until and unless they pass an adversarial administrative review.  So the first policy would devote more funding to establish and maintain a greater administrative edifice to test veterans’ claims for support. The default in the second policy is to assume every veteran’s claim is worthy, and selectively audit a small percentage to test for fraud (analogous to our IRS policy of auditing only a small percentage of tax returns rather than every return). The second would put more of its funding into delivery of services (since selective audits would require a smaller administrative staff). Neither of the policy possibilities described by Bilmes is filled with obscure or empty abstractions. They each embody different basic attitudes toward veterans and our public responsibilities to them. They each lay out the different basic choices we might face as a society—including different choices about the kind of society we might want to be.

When we talk about conceptual possibilities in Interactivity Foundation discussions our aim is to help people think about such different basic choices. We don’t want to get away from reality and lose ourselves in empty or confusing abstractions. We want to get to the bottom of things and talk about the fundamentally different approaches that we might take as a society. As with Bilmes’ suggested policy ideas, the conceptual possibilities generated by an Interactivity Foundation project should help us to clarify the different basic choices we might face as democratic citizens. Along the way, they just may help us to see choices we would never have envisioned on our own.

–Jeff Prudhomme