IF discussions are serious business. But they still allow room for humor. In fact, the more of them I facilitate, the more I've come to appreciate the many ways humor can promote good exploratory discussion. (Surely humor can go wrong in a variety of ways, but...
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...
I want to use this entry as a way of thinking about and using language in public discussion. Philosophers, social thinkers, and cognitive scientists of various kinds have long argued hotly about the origin and nature of language. But “ultimate” questions about...
As the sanctuary discussions that generate IF Citizen Discussion Reports move along, they rely on two distinctive, if not unique, decision-making processes. The first is to preserve any possibility as long as even one discussion participant wants to report it for...
As Interactivity Foundation (IF) has learned through actual experience, experts and lay citizens complement each other well in sanctuary discussions. Experts and lay citizens can complement each other in public discussions, as well. This post explains how and why...
As exploratory discussion, IF discussions thrive on (or even presuppose) contrast. If you haven't covered new ground, you haven't explored. (The contrasting individual conceptual possibilities that are at the core of IF discussions are actually intended not just...
People unfamiliar with IF sometimes ask if our “conceptual” discussions are at all “practical.” The answer isn’t straightforward. One could say that they’re practical “in the Aristotelian sense” or that they’re not practical in the “immediately or strictly...
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....
Sanctuary discussions, which I described in my previous post, need not culminate in a written document. But if their results are to be made available for public discussion, they need to be put in some communicable form. This essay describes the one we’ve used up...
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...