Online Forums
Historically, forums have been held at community sites as face-to-face gatherings. Relatively few forums were conducted at a distance. Ten years ago, the Kettering Foundation investigated the feasibility of online deliberations (Black, 2011) because of their “interest i n potential and pitfalls of the Internet as a space for democratic practice.” The lead investigator found a scarcity of information about online public forums. She detailed multiple Internet tools and concluded that online deliberations can succeed but that testing of designs and tools must be done to provide participants with an easy to use and safe space for their deliberations. The Foundation moved toward online forums in 2013 (Lee, 2013) and found the forums they conducted were effective. Another author (Casey, 2020) wrote about online Common Ground for Action forums and drew the following conclusion: “[It was] clear that techno logy cannot replace face-to- face, in person forums. But it came close.” In Our Story , learn about our findings. The Foundation’s National Issues Forums is a leader in the use of forums for deliberative public engagement. The National Issues Forums use a moderator to guide participants through an issue that has previously been named and framed. Each issue guide contains at least three options for addressing the issue with possible trade-offs and a measure of shift in thinking. (Mathews, 2016) An Extension educator, who faced many contentious public issues, told her story about conducting a community issue forum in the Journal of Extension (Haaland, 2004). After receiving training from the Kettering Foundation, she worked with others to modify the National Issues approach to public deliberation. Civittolo and Davis (2011) describe opportunities for Extension programming by engaging the citizenry in strengthening their communities. Additional stories can be found in the Journal of Extension . Try searching for Issue Forum, community engagement, Kettering. In 2020, Kansas State Extension taught issue forum facilitation skills to 4-H members. The 4-Hers facilitated forums during the 2020 4-H Citizenship in Action Day. Learn more of their story at: https://www.ksre.k-state.edu/news/stories/2020/11/4h-stories-matter-and-civic- discourse.html
Our Story--About Our Forums
We conducted forums in 2018-2019 in three states. The forums focused on strengthening the health and well-being of the farming population. Disruptive impacts of COVID-19 led us to refocus the 2021 forum as we worked with a focus group to name and frame topics for the forum. And, by 2021, we had our risk and resiliency framework. We wanted to use our new socio- ecological framework to draw attention from individual behavior to how the social environment influences behavior and conditions. The COVID-19 disruptions demonstrated the
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