A recent NOVA episode (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/money/) pits the rational actor theorists within the discipline of Economics against the behaviorists. As a sociologist, I've always been more partial to the behaviorists' approaches (like Gladwell and the ...
Two previous installments in this practical tips series have attempted to glean wisdom from the facilitators who have led dozens of discussions on IF reports. We have looked at some of the issues involved in putting behinds in the seats and jump-starting conceptual...
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...
A lot of people wonder why IF public discussions focus on conceptual possibilities. Instead of talking about abstract ideas, why not deal with something really practical? The short answer is that, from one perspective at least, nothing could be more practical...
One of IF’s ongoing tasks is to find the most useful scale and tone for the possibilities in its reports. While we have learned a great deal about how to present possibilities and discuss them, we are still grappling with a number of questions about the relation of...
I'm into week two of my IF-oriented course, and I' m learning more everyday. On Tuesday we had our first official IF-style discussion. I had to bite my tongue often as I suspected, and allow them to generate ideas. I could think of half a dozen objections to...
Picture for a moment two very different kinds of citizen “discussions” that took place this summer. Both were focused on issues surrounding health and healthcare in our society. For the first, you might think of any of a number of the so-called “town hall”...
This post gives some examples of what we mean by taking a more conceptual approach in your discussions.
This post describes the second of the three stages in the Interactivity Foundation's discussion process: generating and developing some contrasting possibilities to respond to the big questions about the area of concern raised in the first stage of the discussion process.