How about collectively think good topic material

[tashi]

Hi All,

This Tuesday I had some discussion with Iris and I am totally agree that to find a topic worth discussing is not a issue but figuring out interesting questions do.
I think it could work like this way:
1. Raise a broaden big topic.
2. Propose some material that you've read and comment on it.
3. Try to highlight some points worth discussion.


For example, "pet" actually reveal a kind of relationship between human and animal. A lion won't do this right? But do we have other relationship with animals? Or how many relationship do we have with animals? So for this we could raise a big topic "relationship between human and animals" or "relationship between human and other species".
And next it will be easy to search any kind of material that give us information we already know or we don't know and we start to work out more and more questions.

Ideally I believe this flow could cook out endless discussions so that we don't even need to worry about topics through out this year.

[tashi]

In my bucket list, I am going to collect more for topics below:

1. Taiwan's food culture
a. How many Taiwan local food do you know? which actually over 80% of them were from other countries like 西米露 is 摩摩喳喳
b. what's the most delicious food you have had in Taiwan by less than NTD. 200


2. Warship
a. god warship, idle warship or else
b. effects to you, to society
c. goodness or badness
d. wanna your children warship you

3. 社會企業 與社會問題
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBk16IIX4Rw
How many society problem you know?
among them did you notice they could be used for making money by solving them?
what's the most critical part you would think should be taken care for 1st priority?

I think these questions are meaningful but if we just go ahead without any pre-study or discussions online, most people would become speechless including me.


4. 台灣產出的各種第一

few years ago I have read from "Common Wealth", they published a book collecting all Taiwan champions and most of them are athletes. Like javelin champion, before reading the book, I haven't heard of that. That could be interesting to discuss because in a samll island and with 20 million people, we got so many champions without our government's support.

5. Leadership

like A black president doesn't mean there is no discrimination in America, could we ask yourself we still have any prejudices in woman leadership? trust me there will be still lots of data that tell you YES or why a successful woman decided to establish WIT(Woman In Tech) and "Girls In Tech"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wb105rIyD_g


And with different cultural, does leadership have different effects for Chinese people, pan asian countries, Africa or Europe?

7. How food and resources are wasted:

I just watched a TED talk that exposed a truth a more developed country waster much more food than those under developed countries.
For example, in America, it just like a ratio of 1:4. The population of America is about 300 million so what food resource wasted can actually feed other 900 million people.
https://youtu.be/bPOBvnwcp30

So maybe we could ask
1. Why they are so wasteful?
2. Are we also wasteful in Taiwan? what kind of behavior would be wasteful but we don't aware or we are aware but we just do it for some purpose?


Unlike previous discussions that sometimes even myself didn't read / watch through materials before meetings, in this mode, even we didn't finish whole study for materials, you would still
get man points online from others like I did above.

[Luis Ko]

sorry, i don't really get the point.. XD

actually what you said is exactly what a host would do i would say. they either find an interesting topic or article they like first, then have questions from it; or have had a main, or say broaden, question first then, find an article or two relevant to it.

so guess to collect as many people's ideas about what to discuss as possible is the main point here. in other words, to have, as many as possible, different people as the host is the key, so that the topics would be more diverse, so as to be more interesting.

then again, that's the hardest part as well lo~

[tashi]

Thanks for Luis' feedback. Maybe I didn't make the point clearly.

Take the discussion you raised "why the crude Asian joke?" as an example, you are interested in this topic and also Michael supported your idea and suggested it would be also funny to loop in our American friends to join the discussion.
So next, if you want it be a a meeting topic, what could you do?

My idea is:

1. Comment more to explain why you think it's interesting and even raise questions you are curious for American's opinion.
2. See if you got more feedback like your another discussion "Never Trump", then some more questions could be generated during the discussion.
3. It could be you, me or another other volunteer to collect and organize the materiel, opinions and questions to put it into a real meeting topic to discuss this face to face.

I believe this of process had been happened before but I was thinking that maybe there is chance we can generate more in this way?

about the "hardest part", actually it has become kind of a weird point because it should be a "right" to practice English by being a host and organize a topic. Nevertheless, if before the end of April (or even March) the new host system still don't work, we got to roll back the former mechanism.

[Tom Lee]

Senior members have tried many methods and may think we've already had the "good" way to find the host as before. Personally, I also think it is a very good way. But there is always a "better" way that we haven't found.

Young members don't have the experience to find a host in different ways. Should we always give a chance to young generation to try new policy? (like the new government)

If it fails, at least we know we can't go by this way, and we may turn or back to the original way and keep going.

Tomorrow will always be better, right?

[Rock]

I agree that questions for discussions are important, and it's not easy to come up with good ones.

How about posting the topics and articles earlier, our future hosts? If you added something like "Questions Wanted", then other members may help organize the questions for you.