American Conversation Project

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.

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. Access control and revocation requirements shaped the platform choices directly — including evaluating and rejecting DSNP as a storage protocol.

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.