ABSTRACT
Never has there been as much information available to help inform public decision making as there is now (Hilbert and Lopez 2011, 60-65; Garson 2013, 1-13; George et al. 2014, 321-326; Stough and McBride 2014, 339-342). Over the last thirty years, there has been an explosion of easily accessible data of all kinds, even in the most remote spots in the world. Sophisticated, but generally available technologies permit us to gather, analyze, model, visualize, interpret, share, store, and retrieve numerical, statistical, photographic as well as meta-data of various kinds at relatively low cost. Paradoxically, while our power to gather, analyze, interpret, share, and store information has dramatically increased-especially at elite research universities, think tanks, and multinational corporations around the world-our collective capacity to both agree on the “facts” in a given situation and on what they mean, seems to have diminished, potentially due to this increased exposure to information (Tewksbury and Riles 2015, 381-398). This paradox can best be managed, in our experience, through joint fact-finding (JFF): collaborative efforts to generate information in a manner that allows stakeholders to agree on (1) the question(s) they want to answer; (2) the best ways of answering these questions; (3) the data they need to collect; (4) the ways they are going to analyze and interpret those
data; and (5) the strategies they are going to use to share what they discover with others likely to be affected by decisions or actions informed by what has been learned.
