Harvesting what we already know about collaborative experiences and empowering groups to create collaborative guidelines Dear collaborative discussion friends, Welcome to the Collaborative Discussion Project Newsletter. In our first newsletter, we highlighted two...
Pre-program surveys Dear collaborative discussion friends, We are kicking off the new year with our first Collaborative Discussion Newsletter, highlighting a new Collaborative Discussion Toolkit activity each week. We have heard your feedback! Our open source...
One of the things that the Interactivity Foundation does is to teach people how to think about public policy possibilities. This will sound patronizing only if you misunderstand why, what, and how we do it. I heard an interview with former Supreme Court Justice...
New participants in an Interactivity Foundation discussion project often wonder how to act when taking part in the discussion. Often when people hear that we’ll be engaged in thoughtful civic discussion, they think of this in terms of “debate” or “argument.” With...
There are many different kinds of the interactivity going on in IF public discussions. But the interactivity of ideas is one of the most important ones. Our reports are developed by two groups of people who meet every month for over a year to explore, develop, and...
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...
As our catalogue of “Perspectives” grows, it’s probably useful to reconsider from time to time some of the basics of the IF process. That’s what I want to do here, all the while recognizing that the process is in some ways quite complex and is under continuous...