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...
Interactivity Foundation Project Discussions aim at generating contrasting conceptual policy possibilities with the hopes of expanding and enriching public thinking about a complex area of social and political concern. You might think of a “policy” as providing a...
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...
Notwithstanding my desires and self-delusions to the contrary, I’m not always right. My wife, children, and co-workers can and will—with only minor prompting—attest to this all too obvious fact. For further proof one need only review any of my failed attempts at...
One of the things I learned from being a collaborative partner in the application of IF process to a series of independent policy explorations of contentious subject matter is that it is difficult to broach conceptual possibilities when so many minds are already...
Near the end of the rock documentary The White Stripes Under Great White Northern Lights, the White Stripe’s frontman, Jack White, talks about the importance of obstacles and tensions for his creative process (here’s an unofficial clip; the video quality is not...
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...
What are IF public discussions like and how do they differ from other type of policy discussions? IF typically organizes a discussion series—usually 3 or 4 meetings—for small groups of people to explore the possibilities in our reports. The possibilities in our reports emanate from the different concerns, beliefs, values, goals, and interests that Americans might have about an area of concern. They thus present contrasting possibilities that emanate from conceptual differences. We ask our participants to try to consider the possibility from the perspective of someone who might propose it before they begin to assess it from their own perspective.
“If an idea does not sound absurd, then there’s no hope for it.”—Albert Einstein I recently came across these words from Albert Einstein in the context of an interview on the topic “Does Science Fiction Predict the Future of Journalism?”. The interviewee, Loren...
One of the ideas that has been recently been under discussion within IF is the possibility that citizen or public discussions of the approaches developed within IF sanctuary projects (that are ultimately published as reports) could be used to further refine or...