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...
IF Fellows maintain a more-or-less continual conversation about how to improve sanctuary projects so that they produce Public Discussion Reports better able to spur truly exploratory public discussions. A perennial focus of our discussions is with making sure that...
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 ...
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 wanted to share my recent experience about using the IF process with a group of faculty at my institution to discuss changing general education requirements. When I attended the 2009 Summer Institute, I considered how to implement IF into venues other than...
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...
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.