January 14, 2011 “Chipping-In” as a Key to Developmental Citizen Discussion A recently concluded “developmental” discussion of energy possibilities reinforced many of the lessons learned about the benefits of repeat participation of those familiar with IF process and materials. That same...
December 28, 2010 Building a “Bench” for Deliberative Discussion No, this is not a “how to” on furniture design. It is more in the spirit of how to cross-recruit for both IF project panel discussions and citizen discussions of...
November 11, 2010 Some Initial Thoughts on Research Questions IF’s ongoing experience with public discussion has provided us with many lessons learned about what works for our facilitators and our participants in discussing conceptual policy possibilities. As practitioners in the...
October 15, 2010 Reaching the Open Minds 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...
September 5, 2010 Citizen Discussion as a Developmental Tool for IF Reports 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...
August 14, 2010 Development of Possibilities in “Difficult” Policy Areas Despite warnings from colleagues and apoplectic reactions from partisans of various stripes, I have been working during the last year to see if it is possible to develop general starting...
June 29, 2010 An Exemplar of Civic Conversation Owen Coyle, a friend of over thirty years duration, passed away a week ago and the time since has been filled with memories of political collaborations and stories shared about...
June 1, 2010 Decision Horses Before the Deliberative Carts or Overdue Decisions? A policy dust-up was in the news recently in the form of Congressional action to end the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” stance on gays and lesbians serving in...
May 17, 2010 Managing Anger in Public Discussion IF public discussions provide participants with opportunities to discuss contrasting policy possibilities in neutral, non-partisan settings. Because these possibilities are meant to be anticipatory of possible policy approaches that allow...