As I was digging through old posts, I would like to add my thoughts to the topic “setting up student discussions” 18 months ago. I am particularly going to recommend the website www.doodle.com for scheduling. Scheduling an event and selecting a topic is very time...
No, this is not a “how to” on furniture design. It is more in the spirit of how to cross-recruit for both IF project panel discussions and citizen discussions of IF reports (though much of this would work in deliberative discussion generally). My “bench” is that...
Back in March I described recruiting single individuals to IF public discussions as a “dead end.” I meant not that it couldn’t be done, but rather that IF’s experience so far is that it’s easier and more effective to work with groups that already exist in the...
The raucous debate last month (March, 2010) over the health care bill was hardly unexpected. For more than one hundred years, efforts to provide better access to decent health care for all Americans have been thwarted. And, in fact, when universal health care was...
It’s time to declare individual recruiting a dead-end approach. The results of upwards of 60 IF public discussions are clear: group-based recruiting is superior. Whether thought of in terms of “’efficiency” or “sustainability,” its advantages over individual...
The current tendency within IF is to recruit at least the generalist panels via Public (or "Citizen") Discussions. Those of us who use Meetup to recruit Citizen Discussion participants have a greater chance of connecting with a broader public. We are not limited...
IF staff, associated faculty, and contracted facilitators have accumulated many useful insights about the art of facilitating public or "citizen discussions" of policy possibilities. Most of these individuals brought significant facilitation experience or other...
I am six months into my first project, and both of my panels are now completing the concern-generating phase of the IF process and are now transitioning to the question-generating phase. Most participants seem to have a much easier time listing their concerns with...