Overall, I think that the deliberation went very well for my group. Throughout the process, we worked well as a team. We worked well together when it came to brainstorming different problems and potential approaches. Our effective delegation within the group allowed us to complete the work on time with a quality product. As for the deliberation itself, I think that we did a great job. We did a lot of planning before the deliberation so that everything went smoothly and followed a schedule to ensure that the deliberation would be the correct amount of time. Something unique that my group did was put the criteria for deliberation on the chalkboard. This allowed us to reference the criteria throughout the deliberation, which kept all of the discussion on track and relevant. The questions that we asked the class were almost all relevant and brought forward new ideas to discuss. We also provided some input and clarification on our end, which was backed up by research that didn’t necessarily make it into the videos. We chose a controversial and high-stakes topic, which was homelessness in Philadelphia. This led to very contrasting opinions in the class. Our approaches catered to different perspectives, allowing for a more well-rounded deliberation where everyone was included. Being such a controversial issue, as a group I think we did a great job maintaining a civil discussion and having ideas be judged by the criteria and not solely by personal opinions. Although it went well overall, I think there are a few things that we could have improved upon. One is by defining the problem’s causes more clearly. We did a great job addressing the symptoms of homelessness and ending the cycle of homelessness, but we overlooked explaining the root causes in our introduction video. While these causes were explained by us and explored by the class in our deliberation, it would have been helpful to have them in the initial video. Another aspect we could’ve improved on is by being more specific in our approaches. We were very specific in some parts, such as explaining what taxes would increase and by how much, but we generalized who would qualify for these programs. For example, we said that the homeless would have access to work training programs, whereas we should have directly stated that they would also have specialized treatment if they had a disability, children, drug abuse, etc. This meant we initially came across as being potentially ableist since some thought that these groups of people weren’t going to be included until we explained that they were key parts of our approach. As a group we wanted to help as many people as possible and not exclude anyone, so we should not have assumed that people would automatically think that they would be included and explicitly stated so in the video portion.
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