The Local Voices Network — Chapter 1
On a snowy afternoon in late January, 2019, Alex Lindenmeyer, a pancake entrepreneur and community organizer checked out a recording device from the Lakeview Branch of the Madison Public Library in Madison, WI.
With a library card and a selfie, the Local Voices Network (LVN) launched in Madison, WI.
Alex is part of LVN’s volunteer network of small business owners, teachers, students, journalists, retirees and librarians. In Madison, the first of four (and growing) LVN chapters, members of the conversation corps receive facilitation training and the assignment to gather groups of neighbors, family and friends for small-group, in person civic dialogue.
Madison’s mayor at the time, Paul Soglin, had announced he would step down after more than two decades in office and a growing number of candidates launched campaigns to succeed him. An active school board race promised to make the Spring Election an important opportunity for Madisonians to participate in local democracy. With growing focus on local civic life, the Local Voices Network launched to provide community members space for more ‘civil and empathic public conversations’ than the divisive arguments that typify social media. The LVN conversations could happen at library branches, community centers and in home living rooms, to maximize the accessibility for community members who don’t frequently attend public meetings. Each conversation is intended to become part of a public conversation network and would be recorded around a custom built recording device, the Digital Hearth, transcribed and uploaded to a searchable platform. The platform is accessible to participants in the conversations, members of the media and local candidates. Journalists, like our launch partners at The Cap Times, could listen in to the conversations to identify themes and information gaps and have the ability to excerpt audio to include in articles or podcasts. Each conversation begins with consent language, reminding participants that what they are sharing is intended to be public and could be shared in local media or to other stakeholders.
The Local Voices Network is a project of the nonprofit Cortico. Cortico was launched from the Laboratory for Social Machines at the MIT Media Lab. Prior to launching LVN, Cortico had worked to analyze Twitter conversation data and talk radio data from across the country during the 2016 election with a project called the Electome. Around the same time, Kathy Cramer, a professor of American Politics at the University of Wisconsin wrote The Politics of Resentment, a landmark study of the rural-urban divide in Wisconsin. Professor Cramer’s research into rural consciousness utilized group interviews and conversations recorded across the state of Wisconsin at gathering places like diners, gas stations and churches.
The idea behind the Local Voices Network, a scalable network of community conversations, is a mixture of the data science and machine learning expertise from Cortico and the local conversations, stories and perspectives Professor Cramer recorded in Wisconsin. LVN follows a regular cycle in Madison, WI and in the other chapter locations where we operate.
Community members gather for a facilitated conversation. These conversations are recorded using the digital Hearth. The conversations are upload to a platform we built where they are transcribed and made searchable to members of the network.
LVN trains facilitators and provides a conversation guide and training manual, inspired by decades of experience in the worlds of dialogue and facilitation. Facilitators may be individual community volunteers or staff of partner organizations interested in convening dialogues to surface experiences and perspectives from the communities they serve. LVN conversations are unique to the groups that gather but have similarities in structure. Each LVN conversation begins with participants sharing a value that is important to them. Unlike a focus group, the participants collectively decide the topics and direction of the conversation. The role of the facilitator in the conversation is to create a warm and welcoming space for dialogue to occur and to orient conversations back towards the local, lived experiences of participants. This local focus allows for other members of the group to walk away with a more nuanced understanding of differing perspectives. You may disagree with my opinion on healthcare, but it’s difficult to argue with the experiences that led me to my opinion.
After the conversations are uploaded and transcribed, members of the LVN and partner news and civic organizations can identify, or highlight, sections of audio and text from the conversation transcript to share. These highlights can be played for other groups gathering in discussion through a speaker built into the digital Hearths or shared as embeddable audio and text for journalists.
A Home for the Hearth
In order to circulate the digital Hearths to groups across the city, the Madison Public Library served as Hubs, or homes for the Hearths. The Madison Public Library is respected in the world of public libraries for their innovative and welcoming public programming. Programs like the Library Takeover invite community members to imagine new ways for library branches to serve communities across the city. Greg Mickells, the MPL Director, is an enthusiastic supporter of our work and members of the library’s community engagement and technology teams were critical partners helping to think through each step of the circulation process. Each of the nine MPL branches serves as a Hearth hub. Members of the conversation corps use their library cards to check out a Hearths. Library meeting rooms acted as reliable gathering spaces for community conversations.
Alex and several colleagues gathered together for an LVN conversation at her pancake shop Short Stack Eatery (if you’re in Madison go for The Blind — a surprise daily special)
Volunteer facilitators are encouraged to gather groups of community members whose experiences and perspectives are not frequently heard in local media or at public meetings. In Madison these could include groups of seniors, parents with small children and members of the Deaf community. Public meetings are a critical element of local democracy, yet they are not always accessible to members of the public, due to familial obligations, language access, time and a score of other reasons. LVN is intended to create new opportunities for community members to participate in public dialogue and civic life.
Over our initial pilot run, the Hearths were checked out of the library branches dozens of times and hundreds of Madisonians participated in conversations. Highlights from LVN conversations made their way into articles and podcasts and were shared on local TV news. With support from the Knight Foundation, over the past year LVN has expanded to three new chapter locations in New York City, Boston, MA and Birmingham, Alabama. Upcoming articles will share insights and stories from our work in these chapters.
2020 has brought new opportunities and challenges. The Police and Fire Commission in Madison has asked LVN to host a series of public conversations to inform the hiring of a new police chief. We joined the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism to host conversations during the New Hampshire primary. In this election year, with a pandemic upon us and global markets in chaos, it is more urgent than ever that we capture the perspectives and concerns of those who are most often overlooked.
Today, we find ourselves in a world where the physical health of our public is at risk when gathering in person, even in small groups. As an organization that brings together human potential and technological creativity, we continue to host conversations that can connect us across geographies, identities and ideologies even when we can’t be together in person.
The Local Voices Network team is moving all of our conversations online using Zoom beginning immediately.
We offer training for conversation facilitators unfamiliar with this format and an updated guide for conversations and orientation for participants. We continue to strongly believe in the unique power of in-person conversations, even as we embrace the opportunity to experiment with the ways technology can help us continue and even grow our connections when we can’t be together.
In the upcoming weeks we’ll be sharing lessons learned from in-person and digital conversations. Visit lvn.org/covid for opportunities to participate in conversations as we continue our mission of connecting across communities and building a stronger democracy by ensuring everyone is heard.
