Civic listening

How do you actually hear what a whole neighbourhood, school, or country thinks — not the loudest voices, and not a survey’s tick-boxes, but the real texture of people’s experience? Civic listening is one answer, developed over roughly eight years by Cortico (a non-profit out of MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication, led by Deb Roy — and born from studying the harms of social media and AI). The method is deceptively simple: talk, understand, share.

The three steps

• Talk. People meet in small groups — ideally face-to-face, in a quiet space around a recording device (though video calls and a mobile app work too), led by a trained community facilitator. The conversation guides deliberately steer people toward personal stories and experiences rather than opinions — which turns out to be a powerful way to find connection between people who assumed they had little in common. With everyone’s permission, it’s recorded.
• Understand. Across many recorded conversations — over different places and times — a community-led sensemaking process surfaces the themes that emerge, revealing the bigger picture. AI tools assist here, but to support, not replace, human insight.
• Share. The result becomes shareable media: voice medleys (collages of real voices) and conversation maps (clickable themes you can drill into and listen to). It’s shared back with the participants, and often published — bringing authentic, unheard voices into the public sphere.

Listening as community leadership

The method turns into a set of roles ordinary people can learn — real civic leadership at a community level: prompt designer (framing a question that fits your community), facilitator (holding space for a small group), curator (deciding which highlights deserve to be heard across divides), and sensemaker (finding the patterns and turning them into media). Cortico calls the whole thing community-powered understanding.

Civic muscles, not a replacement

There’s a lot of AI inside the tools — but the philosophy is to build civic muscles, not to do the human work for people. The technology is scaffolding that makes it easier and more inclusive to play these roles. That’s the same principle as can AI scale deliberation? (complementary tools, not competitive ones), and it rests on the same insight as civic love: stories and connection have to come first.

See it in action in Real Talk for Change (Boston) and the nationwide American Conversation Project.

Dialogue networks vs. social media

Deb Roy calls the resulting pattern a dialogue network, and contrasts it with social media on three axes: content starts with a small-group conversation you go back and highlight, not a solitary post; your voice travels at the speed of trust — you consent before it moves to a less intimate space — not by viral broadcast; and sensemaking lifts up what’s resonant, not what’s trending. It pairs naturally with citizens’ assemblies: record the small-group and plenary conversations, let AI surface islands of agreement and sticking points, and keep an auditable trail of voices behind each recommendation — including dissent (an early tech-enhanced run was an Oregon assembly on youth homelessness). The in-person cousin of the online conversation networks idea.

The machine-led variant

Cortico keeps people at the centre and uses AI lightly. A more automated cousin runs the other way: hand an entire mass online conversation to an LLM and let it cluster the input, summarise it with citations, and surface where people converge and split. That method — AI sensemaking, the approach behind tools like Jigsaw’s Sensemaker and the engine of Bowling Green’s 25-year planning consultation — trades the small-group, story-first texture for scale and speed, which is why its designers keep a human in the loop. Two routes to the same hard problem of hearing a whole community at once.

Sources

• The American Conversation Project, with Deb Roy (Cortico) — National Conference on Citizenship (2025): youtube.com/watch?v=Zm3w5PkbVPo.
• “From Division to Dialogue: How AI Can Save Democracy” — Deb Roy on Life with Machines w/ Baratunde Thurston (2025): youtube.com/watch?v=qKTS0mfXRCk.
• “Making sense of large-scale online conversations” — Jigsaw (Google, 2024), on the Sensemaker method: medium.com/jigsaw.