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December 4, 2006

The Iraq Study Unconference

James Joyner asks in TCSDaily why we haven't learned yet that commissions are a horrible idea:

The idea that blue ribbon committees of greybeards can come up with novel ways of solving problems that everyone would then agree on has long had great appeal. We're positively overrun with the Blue Ribbon Panel on This and the Bipartisan Commission on That.

Just a quick Google search reveals the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (aka "The 9-11 Commission"), the National Commission on Social Security Reform (not to be confused with the 1998 National Commission on Retirement Policy or the 2001 President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security), the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy, the Commission on No Child Left Behind, and the bipartisan Commission to Strengthen Confidence in Congress. The gold standard has to be the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, which was headed by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. It just doesn't get any more bipartisan, moderate, and statesmanlike!

[ . . . ]

Any solution that Baker, Hamilton, and their colleagues could agree to was destined to be so watered down as to be meaningless. Get more international cooperation! Make the Iraqi leadership take responsibility! Make a more concerted effort to solve the Palestinian crisis! Because nobody currently in office ever thought of those things?

Commentary

The post "History's End, History's Beginning" considered whether states might benefit from decentralizing and networking much of their operations. If so, then perhaps commissions could be replaced with "unconferences." Wikipedia defines them thus:

An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is driven and created by the participants, generally day-by-day during the course of the event, rather than by a single organizer, or small group of organizers, in advance. To date, the term is primarily in use in the geek community. Unconference processes like Open Space Technology, however, have been around for over 20 years in other contexts.

For a subject like Iraq, the key would be to include more people, some younger people, and then only give them a few days instead of several months. Unconferences have become very popular in the tech world. Software developer and investor Dave Winer has written this:

The idea for an unconference came while sitting in the audience of a panel discussion at a conference, waiting for someone to say something intelligent, or not self-serving, or not mind-numbingly boring. The idea came while listening to someone drone endlessly through PowerPoint slides, nodding off, or (in later years) checking email, or posting something to my blog, wondering if it had to be so mind-numbingly boring. This observation may turn out to be the Fundamental Law of Conventional Conferences:

The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage.

It’s probably much worse than that. My guess is that if you swapped the people on stage with an equal number chosen at random from the audience, the new panelists would effectively be smarter, because they didn’t have the time to get nervous, to prepare PowerPoint slides, to make lists of things they must remember to say, or have overly grandiose ideas about how much recognition they are getting. In other words, putting someone on stage and telling them they’re boss probably makes them dumber. In any case it surely makes them more boring.

So what to do?

First, you take the people who used to be the audience and give them a promotion. They’re now participants. Their job is to participate, not just to listen and at the end to ask questions. Then you ask everyone who was on stage to take a seat in what used to be the audience. Okay, now you have a room full of people, what exactly are they supposed to do? Choose a reporter, someone who knows something about the topic of discussion (yes, there is a topic, it’s not free-form) and knows how to ask questions and knit a story together.

Real reporters are often the best discussion leaders. Put your DL at the front of the room, with a mike in hand. A couple of people roam the room with handheld wireless mikes to put in the face of the people who are speaking. No one lines up for a mike. Think Donahue or Oprah. The DL’s job is is to craft a story from the expertise in the room. Everyone is a source, about to be interviewed by someone who’s listening. The DL may actually call on people, so no one should get the idea that they can fall asleep or daydream. Pay attention, you might be the next speaker!

Sounds much more interesting than the things most conferences produce. John Steinbeck once did a little riff on parties:

. . . And it is also generally understood that a party hardly ever goes the way it is planned or intended. This last, of course, excludes those dismal slave parties, whipped and controlled and dominated, given by ogreish professional hostesses. These are not parties at all but acts and demonstrations, about as spontaneous as peristalsis and as interesting as its end product.

Mr. Steinbeck, I give you the Iraq Study Group.

Posted by Chester at December 4, 2006 11:47 PM

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Posted by: Rita loves pictures at December 5, 2006 3:23 AM