Once you have a basic understanding of the policy possibility---what it says and what it doesn’t---the next step is to understand why someone might actually propose it. In order to do this, you will typically need to go beyond the description of the policy...
The first step, of course, is to understand the possibility: what it says and what it doesn’t. This almost inevitably means reading the description of the possibility, and the reasoning behind it, and paying attention to the words that describe it. We did this the...
Our founder, Jay Stern, thought that IF’s citizen staff work reports could be an aid to democratic discussion in the United States. But what, exactly, is a democratic discussion or, to put it differently, what makes a discussion ‘democratic’? I recently found an...
Ia Natsvlishvili was a participant in the 50-Hour Training Course in the IF Discussion Process that IF Fellows Mark Notturno and Ieva Notturno conducted in Washington DC last Spring for Junior Faculty Development Program (JFDP) scholars. After successfully...
One of the core aspects of IF is that the policy possibilities in our discussion reports are not developed by politicians and policy wonks, but by citizens for their fellow citizens. Our project facilitators are charged with seeing that our panelists focus upon...
One of the core aspects of IF is that our sanctuary projects have non-participating yet ‘strong’ facilitators for their discussions. But what, exactly, is a non-participating yet ‘strong’ facilitator? The non-participating part is relatively easy. IF facilitators...
Public policy possibilities are often developed and discussed within a fog of enthusiasm. It’s not that the people who advance them do not think at all about their possible practical consequences. But they tend to think a lot more about the consequences that are...
Difference is a fundamental fact of human life. There is similarity too. But difference is the reason why we need to have discussions about public policy. It is also the reason why they should occur face-to-face, over extended periods of time, and with the...
One of the primary tasks of an IF facilitator is to ensure that his panels’ discussions keep to the task of exploring and developing possibilities, and do not degenerate into debates. But isn’t debating the validity and utility of ideas a way of exploring their...
In our sanctuary projects we ask our panelists to develop contrasting conceptual policy possibilities pertaining to their areas of concern, and to then explore the practical policy possibilities that might flow from them if they were actually adopted as public...