For four weeks earlier this year, from late February through early March and just prior to the social distancing and other public safety measures necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the residents of Princeton, Illinois and the surrounding area did something all...
There are many different kinds of the interactivity going on in IF public discussions. But the interactivity of ideas is one of the most important ones. Our reports are developed by two groups of people who meet every month for over a year to explore, develop, and...
IF's Citizen Discussion Reports call on participants in public discussions to "test" conceptual possibilities by exploring their consequences. But this does mean that other considerations are irrelevant to testing. Consider "values," for instance. IF founder Jay...
In my last entry I described citizen discussion reports as a way to connect sanctuary discussion and public discussion. Here I want to suggest several possible ways in which public discussion of our reports might be connected to broader democratic discussion....
At the mention of “citizen discussion,” we tend to conjure up images of rapid-fire, heated exchanges between partisans, often in the glare of the media spotlight. Haste, partisan heat, and intense public scrutiny may to some extent be inevitable features of...
I recently participated in a conference on immigration policy in Washington DC. One of the speakers forestalled criticism by saying that his recommendations were neither new nor original, and that that none of the ideas in the current discussion of immigration...
IF’s approach to classroom discussion is “student-centered” both in the sense that students do the facilitating and in the sense that students shoulder much of the responsibility for shaping the curriculum, as well. As a result, IF-styled classroom discussions...
The Interactivity Foundation (IF) focuses upon three major discussion areas: sanctuary project discussions designed to develop public policy possibilities in our selected areas of concern, public discussions of the contrasting policy possibilities presented in our...
Within the Interactivity Foundation, and as part of our continuing and internal development, we frequently discuss how to make our conceptual possibilities more “useful” for public discussion. And related to that ongoing discussion, we’ve had a number of recent...
Election time is probably the time when people hear and talk about policy the most. So you may feel that you have already heard way too much about policy debates in recent months. And you may feel—just like me—completely disgusted with all the negative campaign...