| Bringing good sense, good humor, and respect back to the public square through face-to face-conversation sit-downs among the people |
| Key Program Features | - All interaction among participants would be in-person. There would be no online chat rooms or discussion forums, nor links to social media.
- A goal of the discussions would be achieving mutual understanding among participants and not the changing of minds. The give and take should be respectful, impersonal, and focused on facts.
- Study materials would be selected by local experts knowledgeable in the subject area, properly sourced, and comprised of foundational or raw materials vs analytical or interpretive materials, i.e., in a discussion of the state tax code, the text of the code itself is reported but not an analysis of the code.
| | | a Rogue Valley in-person discussion society combined with an online, regional knowledge base | | The Discussion Society
the human arts to study, discuss, vote | The Knowledge Base
the technical crafts to collect, compile, report |  | | Proposed: that Rogue Valley residents from all backgrounds and points of view come together in small conversation groups to discuss public policy matters and that the results of that discourse be reported out through an online knowledge base for the benefit of the public and public officials. | | A new Discussion Society would form through open enrollment every three months and run a course of twelve weekly debates. | | Society members would attend grassroots conversation groups with from six to twenty people for in-person discussion. All interaction among the Society would be in-person. There would be no chat rooms or discussion forums in the knowledge base, nor links to social media. | | The Society would discuss matters in an impersonal, open minded, and respectful manner - as an exercise in deliberative democracy. | | Members could meet either at planned locations and times or entirely ad hoc. They would be held in informal, comfortable settings, such as a cafe, a lunchroom, a community center, or restaurant. |
Details | | |  | The Network | | Stick supports a network of small discussion groups. | | | |  | The Knowledge Base | | | | |  | The Web Portals | | | | |  | The Voting Center | | | | | | | |