The deliberation I helped moderate was, “Sentenced to Rehabilitation: Rehumanizing the Prison System,” and the ones I attended were, “The Art of Swiping Right: A Discussion of Dating in the Digital Era,” and, “Let’s Not Beat Around the Bush” How Can We Fight Stereotypes in Porn?”

One thing that was strong about every deliberation I saw was the weighing of pros, cons, and trade-offs among different solutions. Every approach was given ample time to discuss its main idea, strong aspects of it, and drawbacks/unintended consequences that could result from it. It never felt like the moderation of the discussion was skewed towards one approach or another, even if the audience clearly supported one over another, which helped the deliberation stick to its true goal of understanding everyone’s thoughts.

An aspect I really liked about our deliberation was how we brainstormed a wide variety of ways to address the problem. Within certain approaches, we would think of potential problems with our solution and think of different ways of solving it. For example, with our approach of increasing education in prison, we ran into the issue of lack of teachers and brainstormed a list of different ways to increase the supply of educators or incentivize current teachers to work in prisons. I noticed a similar trend in the porn deliberation, as the topic of implementing better sex education in schools was discussed under many different perspectives and many different possible curriculums for different age groups. In the Dating one, I felt like the discussion mostly focused on individual views on each approach, rather than a multitude of different ways to address the issue, which brought the conversation to be more in terms of individual ideals and core values, which isn’t a bad thing.

Another thing that stuck out to me in the porn deliberation was the discussions of personal and emotional experiences, as well as known facts. During the approach about sexual education, participants recollected upon their experience with it during their academic careers. This discussion brought about the shared ideas that our current sex education program is ineffective, tends to avoid discussing actual issues, and is often treated as a joke. After, statistics were brought up that confirmed these ideas, which made the entire discussion seem extremely relevant and informative. From my memory, most of our deliberation was about hypothetical ideas and values and logical steps that spring from them, rather than relying heavily on many personal experiences themselves, which resulted in a different type of discussion.

Another strong aspect of the deliberations was ensuring mutual comprehension among participants. Within both the porn and our deliberation, I noticed that either moderators or other attendees would ask clarifying questions about what was just said, which helped to further the overall understanding of the group. For example, in our discussion, I remember there was confusion about how funds could be redirected to the prison system without increasing taxpayer money, and someone talked about how budget reform could take away money from large pieces of spending, such as the military and bureaucracy, and this could be shifted to prison reform. I did not notice this very heavily in the dating deliberation, and it seemed like when there was potential confusion about what someone said the moderators would sometimes move on to a separate topic without resolving the issue, or another participant would say something on their mind that was unrelated to the previous response.

Adequate speaking distribution was something that I felt could have been worked on for all three of the deliberations I saw. In our one, there was a little corner that was kind of isolated from the discussion, and there was not much conversation that resulted from there. Within the porn and dating discussion, there was an extremely large amount of people, which also led to the problem of not everyone talking in the discussion. Within our deliberation, we did try to avoid the issue by directing questions towards a specific side of the room, but there was no such effort within either of the other groups. I think this could have been better solved by having more questions that everyone answers, similar to how everyone went around and stated their personal stake in the issue. This would ensure everyone gets a minimum amount of discussion times, at the cost of increasing the amount of time on a question though.

Finally, all the participants in the deliberations listened carefully to what others said, even during a disagreement. Everyone was respectful to each other and took the questions and content very seriously and discussed their views in a mature manner. I remember in our discussion, with the topic of voting rights, participants had clearly conflicting views but were still able to talk through their values and reach a point of common understanding among each other. I was especially surprised how during the porn deliberation and dating one (which discussed Tinder a lot), nobody made immature jokes despite the topics opening themselves up to it; everyone stayed on topic and was willing to discuss the issues.

Overall, all the deliberations were very informative and helped to educate me to form stronger decisions on each issue. Although they did not change any of my core values, the insight gleaned from the discussions was able to reinforce my own views and understand the viewpoints of others.