February 2, 2012 ‘The Best-Laid Plans…’ “Quite often good things have hurtful consequences. There are instances of men who have been ruined by their money or killed by their courage” Aristotle Actions have consequences. Whatever we do in both...
September 14, 2011 Democratic Deliberations and Self-Interest I am currently taking a special topics course on Citizenship Learning, Participatory Democracy, and Social Change. Even before starting the course, I knew I would be able to link much...
July 27, 2011 Teaching How to Think About Policy 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,...
November 10, 2010 How to Evaluate an IF Policy Possibility—Part 2 Once you have a basic understanding of the policy possibility---what it says and what it doesn’t---the next step is to understand why someone might actually propose it. In order to...
November 4, 2010 There are policy discussions and then there are policy discussions 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...
October 6, 2010 What’s Different About IF Policy Discussions? The Interactivity Foundation (IF) promotes the thoughtful consideration of a wide range of conceptually contrasting policy possibilities in selected areas of concern. One way that we do this is through...
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...
January 27, 2010 Why Contrasting Possibilities? So much of what goes on under the name of political discussion is aimed at persuading people to accept certain public policies. And so much of what goes on in...
January 27, 2010 Making the Town Hall Work The “ambush” of US Congressional representatives over the summer of 2009 by the foes of national health care reform did little to endear expanded citizen participation to those who bore...