The purpose of this questionnaire is to enable the organizer(s) of the Hong Kong Philosophy Cafe to improve the way the meetings are conducted in the coming year. In answering the following questions, please feel free to be as brief or as long-winded as you wish. You may leave any question(s) blank if you prefer not to answer. If you are totally uninterested in the HKPC and wish to be removed from this announcements list, please send a "reply" message containing the single word "unsubscribe".

1. How many HKPC meetings have you attended?

2. Were you satisfied with the "philosophical content" of the discussion(s)? Why or why not?

3. Aside from the issue of philosophical content, to what extent or in what way(s) did the meeting(s) you attended live up to your expectations? Please be as specific as possible.

4. Aside from the issue of philosophical content, to what extent or in what way(s) did the meeting(s) you attended *fail* to live up to your expectations? Please be as specific as possible.

5. How regularly do you expect to attend HKPC meetings in the future? If there are any reasons you have for not attending regularly, aside from those stated above, please explain them here. (This question is not being asked in order to "check up" on your attendance! It is merely to give the organizer(s) a rough idea of whether or not there is now enough interest to begin having more than one meeting per month.)

6. During the planning meeting in June of 1999, we decided to choose each month's topic at the end of the previous meeting and to announce that topic on this announcements list, but *not* to circulate a list of comments and/or relevant philosophical quotations. Do you think this decision should be reconsidered? That is, do you think it would be valuable to have listmembers send in quotations up to (say) a week before the meeting, and for the listowner to collate these submissions and circulate them to the list a few days before the meeting? (Warning: if members take this seriously, it could lead to some rather long messages being sent to you!)

7. Should the person who will be introducing the topic (and/or the moderator/listowner) send a message to the list before the meeting, itemizing some of the philosophical issues related to the topic and/or some typical strategies for dealing with it? This idea was raised and rejected at the preliminary meeting, on the grounds that newcomers and non-listmembers attending the meeting would be at a disadvantage, and in any case, much-valued spontaneity might be lost. If too much preparation is done, the discussions could become too much like academic seminars. But would the benefits of such a "sneak preview" outweigh these negative points?

8. Should we continue to encourage anyone to volunteer to introduce topics at the beginning of each meeting? Or should the person who introduces the topic always be someone who has some philosophical background and/or someone who is willing and able to appeal explicitly to the views of some established philosopher(s) during the introduction? At the preliminary meeting, we agreed that, in order to keep the discussions relevant to the concerns of ordinary people (i.e., not just academic philosophers), anyone should be welcome to introduce the topic. But should this policy be reconsidered?

9. During the discussions, has the balance between discussing each other's opinions and considering established philosophical views been about right? That is, should the moderator devote more effort to explaining past philosophical theories and/or be more strict in directing attention away from opinions he/she regards as being less philosophically significant? Up to now I (being the usual moderator) have tended to raise only one or two such philosophical theories at each meeting, focusing more on encouraging everyone to think for themselves about the issue(s) in question. Should the balance between these two be adjusted one way or the other?

10. Should the meeting summaries be composed in such a way that they are more like a philosopher's *response* to the issues discussed, rather than just a chronological recounting of what was actually said? The moderator of the New York Philo Cafe writes his summaries in this way. That is, he does not just report what happened, but also reflects further on it, adding "the last word" on the topic as he sees fit. Would you prefer this to the more report-oriented form of the summaries we have had? If you have any other comments on the summaries, please write them here.

11. Should we try to structure ways of continuing our discussions of a given topic after the meeting itself is over? Here are three ideas that have been suggested to me:
a. Convert this list (currently "announcements only") to a full-fledge discussion list, so that issues raised in the meeting and/or the meeting summary could be discussed further online.
b. Keep this list as an announcements list, but have another list for those who wish to discuss the issues. A variation of this would be to allow each person to choose whether or not to have their email address visible when the announcements are sent around. (Currently all addresses are hidden, for the sake of confidentiality.) Then by selecting "reply all", listmembers could send a message to all those who want to receive more than just announcements.
c. Hold a once-a-month online conference/chat session during which we would discuss the issues further. The topic for the next meeting could also be selected/refined in this way, either in lieu of taking time for this at the end of each meeting, as we now do, or as a supplement to clarify what we will discuss. There are numerous web sites we could use for this purpose; see for example, http://my.placeware.com/mpw/home/.

12. As the number of people interested in the HKPC grows, the likelihood of holding more than one meeting per month increases. However, in order for this to be feasible, we will need more people to assist with leadership and organizational matters. Would you be willing to do any of the following? (Please confirm your willingness here, even if you have already expressed it to me previously.)
a. Introduce a topic.
b. Moderate a meeting.
c. Take notes and write them up as a summary. (Note: I normally edit the summaries before putting them on the HKPC web site.)
d. Organize a separate regular "branch" (?) of the Hong Kong Philosophy Cafe.
e. Assist with web site maintenance and/or advertising issues.

If you have any other ideas as to how the meetings could be improved, please explain them below. When you are finished, send this questionnaire to me (Steve Palmquist) at stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk. Thank you for taking the time to express your views on these issues.