ThoughtExchange Interactive Community Engagement Platform

The following are the available ThoughtExchanges open for community participation:

No Exchanges are open currently

The following are the ThoughtExchanges that recently closed:

Proposed School Year Calendar Policy
Participation Dates August 10 – 24, 2023
View Interactive Feedback Report

Repurposing Nottingham Elementary School for Swing Space
Open Until September 15, 2023
(Interactive Feedback Report Coming Soon)

Relocation of the Middle School Spanish Immersion Program
Open Until September 15, 2023
View Interactive Feedback Report

ThoughtExchange aims to foster a rich spectrum of perspectives, even those that might be limited in scope. To facilitate this, participants can provide feedback by rating thoughts on a scale of one to five stars to indicate their level of agreement.

The guidelines for participating in Exchanges are clearly presented at the outset of each Exchange for our community’s consideration before they engage in the conversation. Each Exchange states the following in the opening instructions, “Please remain polite and respectful – thoughts that are rude, hurtful, or identifying may be removed from the Exchange.”

While APS encourages open dialogue and diverse viewpoints, sometimes thoughts that are rude, hurtful, or contain personal identifiers may be shared and could possibly be removed. However, it is important to clarify that, in accordance with First Amendment principles, APS is unable to remove all comments solely for not adhering to the aforementioned guideline unless they contain hate speech or threats.

Unlike a traditional survey, participants are able to transparently express their thoughts and feelings in their own words and react to the unedited perspectives of others. In a polarized exchange, some of those ideas may be harmful or triggering for other members of the community, but it is important to emphasize that sometimes the most difficult topics to talk about are the ones that are most important to understand. Because of this, Exchanges may be used instead of a closed-ended survey where the information participants see and share is controlled.

Doing this, however, prevents participants from seeing how other members of the community are feeling and gaining empathy and understanding into other perspectives – even those community members do not agree with. Furthermore, an Exchange allows leaders and participants to see gaps or truths they may not have been aware of with respect to the challenges and opportunities before them.

The strength of an Exchange over a survey is that it gives much of the control over the conversation to the participants themselves. They can express ideas in ways that are not possible when filling in bubbles on highly-vetted response lists. In rating the thoughts that other participants provide, people also learn more about perspectives that differ from their own.

Ultimately, the purpose of ThoughtExchange is to enable a free exchange of thoughts without censorship. This approach ensures that we capture a wide range of perspectives to inform our decisions effectively.

The following are the two ways thoughts are moderated:

• Community Moderation: Community moderation is the most open and transparent approach to reviewing shared thoughts. With this method, all thoughts entered into the exchange are immediately visible to participants, making the process as smooth as possible. If a participant sees a thought they think is inappropriate, they can click the three dots in the top right-hand corner of the thought bubble to Report it.
• Machine Moderation: Machine moderation allows the software to automatically review thoughts before they are visible to participants, and report those that contain rude or hurtful language, individuals’ names, and duplicate thoughts shared by the same participant. By default, this feature uses a list of commonly seen words and phrases to determine thoughts that should be reviewed.

As a practice, staff can respond to a thought that is visible to all users during the rating process, particularly in cases where comments may be offensive or contain misinformation. These comments help to directly answer questions, provide clarity, address concerns, and correct misinformation.

Embracing transparency is absolutely essential when hosting Exchanges about polarized issues. Removing thoughts simply because they are uncomfortable will erode participant trust and make certain groups feel like they are being censored.

The goal of an Exchange is always to hear from people with diverse opinions and sometimes the thoughts shared will be difficult to read, but as long as they are not overtly rude or hurtful, they will remain in the conversation and the community is encouraged to only give them one star to indicate they do not agree with a specific thought.