24 March 2012

Fun with Stickers, or How the Massachusetts Autism Commission Chooses Its Priorities for Policy

On 15 August 2011, the members of the Massachusetts Autism Commission attempted to cull something on the order of thirty or forty recommendations to a much smaller number. The identified priorities — all thirty to forty or so of them — were written on large pieces of white paper taped to the walls. Each commissioner and sub-committee co-chair present had six colored dot stickers — the kind usually seen at yardsales or in kids' reward books. They were instructed to place their stickers next to the numberered recommendations that they saw as most important. What ensued was highly amusing, particularly when I put it to video and set it to music later. (Pay close attention to the hands placing the stickers.)


  1. The video is not there on my iPad ;(. My autistic daughter gets the heebie Jeebies from stickers. She would have had to leave for sure.


  2. Um what am I watching for? I know sticker placement is a fairly common quicky vote thing. . .

    1. Sorry... maybe it's only funny to me. I just found the whole thing amusing.

  3. well Lydia this cracks me up. Especially the woman chugging the coke or whatever, and the guy in the wheelchair thinking "shit, how am I gonna get in here, all these people running around, I can barely reach those damn posters they are so high on the wall...." Love the music.

  4. Enjoyed being the hand scrutineer.

    Did people isolate their index fingers?

    Loud? Quiet? Trapped? Free?

  5. As an unrelated aside, it took way too much effort to load that video with my security settings, though I finally did manage to get it to load.

    (First I had to enable Flash, which I normally leave disabled. But there was still no video. So I looked at the source code for the page and saw that the embed URL was from Facebook. Which meant that I had to allow cross-site requests to Facebook in AdBlock, which I normally leave blocked because of that whole tracking cookie thing...)

