FIR 002: Making the Case
How to read this course. FIR 002 (Making the Case) is a short, free companion course. It sits beside the Free Foundation rather than inside it: the Foundation sequence remains BSE 099 (Why This Matters) → BSE 100 (Source Discipline & Methodology) → BSE 101 (Individual Readiness) → BSE 102 (Household Readiness), in that order, and nothing here changes it. You need only BSE 099 to begin.
Every other course in this catalog is about becoming ready. This one is about the conversation that happens before anyone else starts — the meeting, the memo, the fifteen minutes in front of a council. It is deliberately the shortest course FIR offers, because a course arguing that the first ask must be small and finishable has no business being long.
The governing doctrine is Alarm without an act is abandonment: state the danger once, with sources, then spend everything after it making the audience’s own next move obvious, small, dated and finishable. The load-bearing fence is fence(HC) — honest communication. Everything in this course makes a message more persuasive, which means everything in it can be misused. The fence is what separates the practice from manipulation, and it is scored.
This course teaches method, never content. It does not re-argue the threat — BSE 099 owns that, and you have already taken it. It does not re-derive source discipline — BSE 100 owns that. It does not brief decision-makers — GOV 110 (Resilience for Decision-Makers) owns that. FIR 002 trains the person standing in front of the decision-maker.
How to present a threat this large without freezing the person you need to move — and how one small, finishable ask becomes a movement. FIR 002 is free, permanently free, and open to anyone who has completed BSE 099 (Why This Matters). It is optional for every track, and it is a hard prerequisite for BSE 307 (FATP / Instructor Development), because an instructor must be able to carry the case to an audience that has not yet accepted it. Every other course in this catalog makes a person or a community more ready. This one teaches you to bring somebody else in. The course diagnoses why capable, informed audiences read alarming material, agree with it, and then do nothing — pseudoinefficacy, threat without efficacy, the gap between intending and doing, and the sorting burden — then supplies ten rules, an eight-element structure, a pre-publication checklist, and the five structural parts that turn a message into a movement. The governing doctrine is Alarm without an act is abandonment: state the danger once, with sources, then spend everything after it making the audience’s own next move obvious, small, dated and finishable. The load-bearing fence is fence(HC), honest communication — persuasion technique is never a licence to overstate the record. The course teaches method, not content: the threat itself is owned by BSE 099, source discipline by BSE 100 (Source Discipline & Methodology), and the decision-maker’s own brief by GOV 110 (Resilience for Decision-Makers).
On representing others. This course does not provide legal advice, and the Foundation for Infrastructure Resilience has no engaged legal counsel reviewing member communications. When you speak to a public body, a board, or the press, you may be making representations that carry obligations for your employer, your jurisdiction, or FIR. Whether you may speak for an organization, what disclosures a public meeting requires, and how lobbying and public-records rules apply to your advocacy are questions for that organization’s own counsel — route them there before you speak, and record the routing. Nothing in this course authorizes you to represent FIR.