American Conversation Project
Infrastructure for Americans to talk to each other on purpose.
- 2024–
- Lead
- live
- 10
- 100+
- 100+
- 26
Talking across difference is a skill, and skills atrophy. The American Conversation Project treats that as a practical problem with a practical fix: give people a place to host a structured conversation, and give anyone looking for one a way to find it.
The hub at amcon.pro does three things for participants. Individuals apply to become hosts and facilitate conversations in their own communities. Organizations register as partners to run many conversations at once. And a live map and calendar show what’s happening and where — public libraries in Miami-Dade and East Brookfield, community foundations in San Benito County, a crochet group in Kentucky.
That last detail is the tell. This isn’t a convening for people who already attend convenings. It runs where people already gather — more than 100 library partners so far, and more than 100 conversations already recorded.
Where it’s going
The project launched to get Americans talking about what the country means at 250. The anniversary has passed; the conversations have not stopped.
The program focuses on all 26 Knight Cities, with two targets ahead: recruiting youth leaders to host 250 intergenerational conversations across those cities, and building toward 100 community foundation partners spanning all 50 states.
Libraries and community foundations are the right unit of deployment because they already exist everywhere, already hold local trust, and are not identified with a side.
Five subsystems, not a website
Underneath, the hub is an integrated platform covering partner engagement, conversation and participant management, deep conversation analysis, youth engagement training, and program survey collection and analysis.
The architecture was driven by an unusual constraint: consent revocation. When people record a real conversation about something they care about, they need to be able to withdraw it later, and that has to propagate through analysis and storage.
Building for the right to take something back is a different problem from building for scale, and it’s the one that mattered here.
A program of the National Conference on Citizenship in partnership with Cortico. Funded by the Knight Foundation, Carnegie Corporation, and the Mott Foundation.