Abstract: "What roles do major interactive organizations in the D. C. area play in informing Congress on persistent issues that culminate in legislation? What processes do they use? What criteria did they apply to choose those processes? How effective are those processes in preparing the Congress to shape legislation? How do Congressional insight-forming processes compare in efficacy with those developed and tested over forty years of research carried out by the author and three major types of research collaborators (past and present)?"

This proposal is an application for a research grant titled "Congressional Research Award." Warfield wrote it in response to an invitation from The Dirksen Congressional Center, 2815 Broadway, Pekin, IL 61554, Tel:309.347.7113, Fax: 309.347.6432, http://www.dirksencongressionalcenter.org. The Dirksen Center is named for the late Senator Everett M. Dirksen of Illinois, who had been one of the most highly respected members of Congress during his lifetime. Warfield received the invitation for proposal in late November 2008, and completed the manuscript in mid-January, 2009, in time to submit it for a 1 February 2009 deadline. Warfield doesn't know how the Center got his name and address, or why he was sent an invitation to apply for the award, but the subject matter was of interest to him, so he decided to respond with a project proposal which would entail his interview and analysis of workings of several public policy "think tanks" in the Washington, D.C. area. He planned a project which would present a comparison of their methods with the Warfield Interactive Management methods. In order to garner interest from and accessibility to the think tanks he enlisted cooperation of School of Public Policy at George Mason University to join in the project to provide Warfield the status of representative of the School of Public Policy. The Dirksen Center grant is only $3,500 but Warfield got George Mason University Foundation to agree to match that amount if he succeeded in getting the award. The award money would be spent on Warfield's travel expenses during summer of 2009 to Washington, D.C. where he would conduct his interviews. Warfield's comment was that he really did not want to win an award, he simply wanted the people at the Dirksen Center to read his ideas, in hopes some of them would recognize their value. Completing interviews for such a project as he described would be pretty hard work for someone Warfield's age, but he would try to do it anyway, should he happen to win a grant. Warfield commented soon after he finished writing the proposal that it had a wonderful project for him to undertake, because the terms of the grant application limited the descriptive summary to about 8 pages. Consequently he had to work to reword and condense and explain his work very clearly inside concise boundaries. The application's brevity had forced him to explain his ideas in a manner he had not done before. (R.W. January 30, 2009, Sheffield, Alabama.)