Identify decision points

Map out the connections

Sometimes it can seem very difficult to track down who makes decisions and how they are made. One useful strategy, (developed by a group originally named GATT-Fly, and now the Ecumenical Coalition on Social Justice) is called the Ah-Hah! seminar. Based on the "the assumption that people acquire a basic knowledge of how the political and economic system works through their own lives and experiences", this group process prompts people to map out the connections between their day to day lives and decisions that affect them, literally drawing a very large picture that links each level of activity and decisions.

Another way of finding out where and how decisions are made is to "follow the gold" - find out where financial interests are, and what sources of funding are supporting a particular initiative.

Discover what the options really are

Often technologies are presented with unnecessarily limited options, like Henry Ford's description of color choices in Model T Fords - any colour as long as it's black. Early telephony could accommodate group discussions in a community, and was even used for broadcasts, but this option was eliminated by structural and technical decisions by corporations and governments by about the 1920's. Even now, there are a range of options for expanding the broadband access that is needed for increased use of computer and conferencing systems (ISDN, ASDL, cable, satellite, etc.) Some of them involve changes at a central point, some involve changes to entire infrastructures, such as the type of cable that carries the signal, some involve changes to how the cable is used and the signal is prepared for distribution.

As another example of decisions that may limit options is in the regulatory environment. Previously, under CRTC regulations, it was acceptable to support universality of access to phone service by averaging costs and revenues over an entire system, but the CRTC now stipulates that one component of service cannot be used to subsidize another component. This change is a political decision that may well result in whole categories of areas, for example, rural and remote regions, not receiving service because the cost of providing the service cannot be reasonably recovered by charges to subscribers.

But behind this decision is a range of possible choices, both technical and political, sometimes not evident at first glance, about what kind of technical systems to use, what groups of subscribers or types of service are considered when assessing cost recoverability, what policies are being used to govern specific rate structures, and so on. These choices are rarely exposed or explained in decision making, and tend to be addressed superficially in cover language, such as "everyone knows there have been cross-subsidies in phone service and now we're redressing that inequity". In this particular case, the costs of each service can be defined in a variety of ways, depending on the accounting systems used and the ways that capital and operating expenses are accounted for.

Find out where the boat is going...

...and decide if that's your destination before you jump on for fear of missing it. We too are decision makers, but our decisions can be influenced by external pressures. There seems to be a sense of urgency to "not miss the boat", to not be left behind by a particular technology. For women, who have felt left behind by many technologies in the past, this is a particularly compelling argument. There can be pressure to not miss out this time, to have a chance to get in there and try to influence how things will work out before it's too late.

But each of us needs to take time to assess our own goals, and how any given initiative is related to it. Heather Menzies in Whose Brave New World argues for the need to take time to connect with each other in a personal way to reflect our own realities and share our perceptions with others so we can assess the broader implications of a particular direction in society.⁷¹ Creating a sense of urgency, the exhortation to "act now", a standard tactic of both high pressure sales and of propaganda, is designed to prompt us to bypass our better judgment, circumvent considered thought and jump on the boat.