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Vision

Opinions are not changed by facts, opinions are changed by relationships

— Overheard at Chi Hack Night

The goal of this project is to create a guide for cultivating small, tight-knit, but politically diverse groups of people who can share and debate ideas with each other, in order to break the echo chamber or filter bubble effect that has become so prevalent in our online interactions.

In the wake of the 2016 election, it has become clearer than ever that we as a nation are artificially divided into two camps. Right/Left, Red/Blue, Conservative/Liberal, however you want to call it, every four years (and to a lesser extend during midterm elections) we choose our camps, dig in, and start trying to defend against the other side.

This is an artificial division, and it makes us as citizens weak and susceptible to manipulation by political power. Politically, we do not exist along a one-dimensional spectrum. We are all the products of different circumstances, and we each as individuals hold a unique combination of political views. Today, it is easier than ever to simply surround ourselves with people that think just like we do, and avoid the difficult task of trying to understand why our neighbors might feel the way that they do. When we are divided and huddled in our filter bubbles, we are susceptible to fear politics.

Here we plan to build a guide for doing the hard work of not just seeking out relationships with people who think differently than you do, but investing in those relationships and building small communities to whom the members feel bonded and loyal. From there, as those individuals gain insights into those who don't share their views, they will be better able to recognize the echo chamber effect in their other interactions, and hopefully be able to articulate opposing viewpoints to others in their echo chamber.

Seek to undersand before being understood.

Loose Goals

• The goal of the guide is encouragement at least as much as instruction. It can be a daunting prospect to step out of your comfort zone in this way, and easy to abandon if things get heated. The guide should reassure people that this is all normal, and have advice for how to come back to a conversation that has maybe devolved or what to do if multiple participants are ganging up on another, etc.

• The guide should be technologically agnostic, bordering on anti-tech. The goal is personal interactions, in whatever form is most accessible for the visitor. A group could just as easily meet each week in a coffee shop as exist on Facebook.

• The guide should contain advice and aggregated information on how to seek out news and editorials that don't just support your own views, for those who are interested in doing so but not ready to start a discussion group.

Open Questions/Discussion

• What incentive do people have to join?
• How to get news and media from differing viewpoints and sides?
  • One option is allsides.com, listed in the Other Resources page
• Maybe we have two (or more) levels of engagement. eg:
  • If you just want to seek out news and publications that are outside of your sphere of bias, we have guidance there
  • If you want to actively participate in discussion, we have guides for starting, finding, or maintaining discussion groups.