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Back to School has always been a time of reflection and renewal for me. A chance to start fresh, look ahead, and consider what I can do to make the coming year better than last year. I confess to being an optimist.
This October in Voices, we are excited to share recent updates about Cortico’s work with partners; in fact, to celebrate a milestone: we have now worked with over 100 partners! This is a testament to the desire of communities to better understand one another, and to the quality of the work they can accomplish using Cortico’s platform. You will read below about some groundbreaking efforts as we broaden the reach of our network of community partners and deepen our experience in the areas where we believe our technology and methods can do the most good.
There’s also other big news! Earlier this month at the Ars Electronica Festival, I introduced the new name for our platform – Fora – to an international community of artists, scientists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and activists from all over the world. We’re thrilled to unveil our platform’s new name and look (which replaces “Local Voices Network” and “LVN”) — our first step toward providing an enhanced, seamless experience across mobile and desktop. Fora is the plural of forum and reflects a key idea about the work that our growing network of global partners is doing: creating spaces for listening to underheard stakeholders and connecting these voices to more informed decision-making.
The Cortico team understands the urgency of the moment. The social fabric that underpins democracy continues to fray worldwide. We have accelerated our efforts to create spaces for dialogue and listening. I am grateful to all our partners and supporters. Your interest in and engagement with Cortico is meaningful to our entire team.
As always, we welcome your feedback!
Deb
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News & Updates:
Partner Spotlight:
Product Updates:
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Who Owns the Truth? Ars Electronica 2023
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The 2023 Ars Electronica festival posed a big question—who owns the truth?
Last month, Cortico and our colleagues from the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (MIT CCC) were invited to Linz, Austria to tackle this question and take center stage to showcase our groundbreaking work at the intersection of design, technology, and society.
Cortico & CCC Exhibit and Workshops
MIT CCC students presented "Collective Echos," an immersive experience combining physical, acoustic, and data visualization design to bring to life a living library of human experiences. This exhibition showed the power of collaboration by showcasing stories and sensemaking made possible by Cortico’s platform and Cortico partners.
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We also hosted multiple workshops, including a session on harnessing the power of tech-enhanced Citizen Assemblies to reimagine healthy democratic spaces, led by Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou (Head of Translational Research, MIT CCC) and Claudia Chwalisz (CEO of DemocracyNext).
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When leading thinkers in the world come together to answer the question of "Who Owns the Truth?", we are hopeful that real impact is not far behind.
Introducing Fora
Cortico's CEO and Co-Founder Deb Roy delivered a keynote address that focused on how the growing societal fragmentation and misinformation are exacerbated by the business model of social media and AI. Deb presented Cortico's vision: designing spaces to harness the potential of digital networks, with a lift from generative AI, to foster constructive communication at scale. He also introduced Fora—our platform’s new name and look—and previewed our integrated mobile social network app coming later this year.
Our presence at Ars Electronic showcased our commitment to transformative communication, amplifying voices, and bridging divides on a global stage.
>Check out all the Cortico and MIT CCC led activies at Ars Electronica here.
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A Growing Team
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We are delighted to announce that Josh Flax—former Deputy Director for Policy & Strategy at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS)—has joined the Cortico / MIT CCC team. His first tasks will be working with CCC to build models and design programs that will bring CCC’s methods and tools into the workplace. He will then move over to Cortico as Vice President, Workplace Programs and Partnerships, where he will lead the design and deployment of Fora@Work, the application of Cortico’s new conversation platform to the workplace.
And we are growing even more! Since our last newsletter, we have welcomed four additional full-time staff to Cortico. Our new colleagues are already contributing to our product development, engineering and partnership teams.
Meet our newest team members below!
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Be Heard Durham
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In Durham, North Carolina, the City's Community Engagement Division was created to enhance the lives of its residents. At its core lies Equitable Community Engagement, a process that prioritizes the voices of underrepresented and disproportionately impacted community members. To advance this mission, the Community Engagement team joined forces with Cortico to elevate these voices and establish trusted feedback channels.
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The result? A sustainable system that supports community members to influence City decision-making. The comprehensive view of Durham residents' experiences enables relevant City departments to inform both short- and long-term work.
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“5 years ago, I would’ve said that, in my career, I want people in power to listen to people, and I realized that that’s what I’m doing right now.”
-Amber Wells, Community Engagement Analyst, City of Durham
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On September 15, members of Durham’s Community Engagement team invited our own Vy Dao (Director of Learning and Practice, Cortico) to showcase how a collaboration with Cortico enables communities to better advocate for their needs in decision-making processes. The response from other cities in attendance was enthusiastic and we are eager to continue forging a path for innovative and effective community engagement strategies nationwide.
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Coming soon: Be Heard Durham—an interactive portal showcasing Durham's community conversations. Soon, Durham residents and beyond can explore experiences and stories by theme, city district, and community organization, among others.
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LISTEN IN Get a sneak peak of the portal experience with the Be Heard Durham voice medley below!
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> Read more about our work with the City of Durham here.
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Climate Conversations
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"Climate Conversations" is a pilot intervention designed to support individuals experiencing climate distress. There is a well documented need for emotional and mental health support in response to climate change, and our joint initiative addresses this need. Spanning three diverse locations: Lagos, Nigeria; New Orleans, US; and London, UK, youth and elders were invited to small group conversations to reflect on their experiences and emotions related to the climate crisis. Intergenerational participants shared how they have been affected, their feelings about the climate crisis, what they wish the other generation knew about their emotions, the importance of discussing the climate crisis, and their aspirations for future actions.
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LISTEN IN Paulette from New Orleans reflects on the power and usefulness of small group conversations for getting people activated on the issue:
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The conversation portal for Climate Conversations is now live! Follow the link below to explore themes, insights, and the real intergenerational voices who shared their experiences to inform this work. This portal serves as a valuable resource to prompt action and as a model for continued conversations.
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The Haitian Times
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As the national conversation about immigration takes center stage, we appreciate connecting with communities who seek to strengthen their ties to culture and to each other. Our new partnership with The Haitian Times, a leading voice in the Haitian-American community, presents an opportunity to elevate authentic stories of the Haitian-American experience.
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In collaboration with Cortico, The Haitian Times will conduct listening tours virtually and in-person in cities beyond the largest Haitian populations of New York City and Miami, collaborating with local organizations, clergy members, and entrepreneurs to gain an understanding of community experiences and needs in lesser-known enclaves.
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The Haitian Times is one of 17 news organizations to receive support from the American Press Institute for launching and expanding projects to promote and strengthen civic discourse in their communities.
Stay tuned for the compelling stories and insights that will emerge from this collaboration!
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"We are thrilled to work with Cortico on our Audience Listening Tour. Our goal is to listen and gain a better understanding of what our community needs and wants. Cortico supports this effort and offers a way for us to organize and manage what we learn."
-Cherrell Angervil, Audience Engagement Director, The Haitian Times
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Second Harvest, Wisconsin
Cortico's tools will support a pilot project by Second Harvest Foodbank of Southern Wisconsin to gain a deeper understanding of food insecurity needs and to optimize food distribution strategies and response.
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Enhancing our tools to provide a more useful & impactful experience for partners.
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Meet Fora!
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The work we have done with partners has provided important feedback for our growth and development, leading to an evolution in our product vision and identity. Fora—our renamed platform—will continue to offer tools Cortico has used within and across communities. Fora will significantly enhance the experience by:
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- Building a more seamless connection between our features for listening, sensemaking, and sharing
- Leveraging advances in AI to provide more efficient and scalable sensemaking, acting as a powerful thought partner for humans doing the listening
- Creating a mobile app that will support far more inclusive and scaled participation in conversations and enable participant-led organizing
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Stay tuned for exciting updates on Fora in the coming year and beyond.
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COMING SOON
Enhancing our tools to provide a more useful & impactful experience for partners.
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Sensemaking is the unique process in Cortico’s conversation analysis, taking place after conversations are recorded and uploaded to Fora. It’s a human-led process in which Partners, working alongside Cortico, use technology to make sense of conversations. Sensemaking provides community-powered, nuanced analysis at scale and is at the heart of our work. That said, it can be a laborious and time-consuming effort: our four-step process comprises: 1. highlight generation; 2. codebook creation; 3. highlight tagging with identified themes; and, 4. summarization.
Given how quickly AI has advanced, we are eager for our partners to benefit. Cortico is leveraging this power to help alleviate the monotony of Sensemaking. And we just made a huge leap in that direction.
In the first example of how AI-assisted Sensemaking can power the process, we prototyped a demo involving codebook creation—a process that currently can take weeks. Using AI, we generated a codebook for 22 conversations in about 15 minutes! Taking a user-centered approach, this new feature will continue to put humans in the driver seat, while greatly alleviating the time and labor currently required.
Fora Live Recording
Fora brings people together in recorded small-group conversations to share life experiences, lift underheard voices, and guide informed action. To make hosting these conversations even easier, Cortico is adding new capability to the Fora platform: Fora Live Recording (Fora Live).
 Fora Live will let anyone with a web-enabled device record in-person conversations anywhere with an internet connection. In the coming months, facilitators will be able to record conversations directly on the Fora platform—no more external audio file collection and upload required!
Stay tuned as we continue to introduce changes on our platform that enhance the Fora experience for partners and communities.
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Rolling Stone
TRUTH IN TECH
These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI
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NPR
Teens say social media is stressing them out. Here's how to help them.
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Send us an email.
For more information about Cortico and our work, please feel free to contact us at hello@cortico.ai.
Follow us on Social Media!
If you haven't yet, follow us and you'll hear more partner and participant stories just like these. Check out our LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
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