Broad Listening

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What is Broad Listening?

Broad Listening turns a project into a public page that anyone can visit — no account required. The page shows a live opinion landscape synthesized from the project’s conversations, and invites visitors to react to the statements it surfaced: agree, disagree, or pass. As more people weigh in, the map updates, so participants act on the results instead of submitting into a void. It’s the difference between a survey and a conversation the whole community can see. A survey collects answers privately; a Broad Listening page shows people where the group is converging and where it splits, and lets them place themselves on that map.

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When to use it

Reach for Broad Listening when you want to hear from a wide, open audience and let them see the emerging picture:

• Public consultation — gather input on a decision, policy, or direction from a community or customer base
• Large-scale listening — open a topic to far more people than would fit in a facilitated session
• Ongoing sensemaking — keep a page live so opinion can accumulate over time

For small, structured groups, a standard session or chain is usually the better fit. Broad Listening is for scale and openness.

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How it works

1. You run one or more sessions inside a project — these produce the raw material.
2. Harmonica distills the conversations into a set of short, votable statements and a synthesized opinion landscape.
3. You publish the project as a public page.
4. Visitors read the landscape and react to the statements; the page updates live as votes come in.

Because it builds on a project, everything you attach to the project — its sessions, knowledge, and context — feeds the public page. See Managing projects for the project side.

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Publish a project

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What visitors see

• The opinion landscape — a map of where opinion sits, showing where the group converges and where it divides, in the spirit of Polis-style tools.
• React to statements — for each statement, a visitor can respond agree, disagree, or pass. Reactions are anonymous.
• Where you land — after reacting, a visitor can see their own position on the map relative to everyone else, shown pseudonymously.
• Live updates — the landscape and counts refresh as new reactions come in, without a reload.
• Reasoning lenses (optional) — if you enable them, the page offers extra views that cluster participants by how they reason about the topic, not just how they voted.
• A way to go deeper — visitors can open a chat to explore the topic further, right on the page.

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Anchored deliberation on a statement or cluster

Beyond reacting agree, disagree, or pass, you can let visitors go deeper on a specific part of the map. When you enable open deliberation on a published page, a visitor can pick a single statement, or a cluster of related statements, and start a short facilitated conversation anchored on exactly that element. The facilitator opens from the anchor, states where the community currently stands on it using the vote splits, and draws out the visitor’s own position and reasoning. What they contribute flows back into the topic’s living map and its pool of votable statements, so a deliberation deepens the picture rather than sitting off to the side. This is opt-in per page and separate from the basic agree, disagree, and pass reactions, which keep working as before.

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Read the deliberations

Deliberations are not only raw material for the map. A Deliberations section on the project’s Opinion Map tab, below the landscape, collects every anchored conversation the page has produced. Threads are grouped by the statement or cluster the visitor actually reacted to, recorded at the moment they reacted. Labels on a map shift as it recomputes, so the group shows you what the person was really responding to rather than what that element is called today. Each group shows how many conversations it drew and, where one can be generated, a short summary of what participants said. You can open any single thread to read its full transcript. The section is read-only and visible to people with access to the project.

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Manage the statement set

Statements on a public page come from several places: your sessions, the project’s knowledge, and anything seeded from an uploaded source. To see all of them at once, open Manage statements on the project’s Opinion Map tab. The drawer is editor-only and lists every statement grouped by where it came from, alongside its running vote tallies. From there you can exclude a statement that does not belong on the public page. Excluding is not deleting:

• The statement disappears from the public page, from voting, and from the clustering that builds the map.
• Its votes are kept, so Restore puts it back exactly as it was.
• It will not quietly reappear the next time Harmonica generates statements.

There is deliberately no way to reword a statement that is already live. People voted on the words in front of them, and rewriting one would change what their votes meant. Keep it or exclude it.

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Get listed on the Broad Listening Hub

The Broad Listening Hub is the public gallery where visitors browse published topics. Publishing your project gives you a shareable page immediately, but listing it on the hub is a separate, curated step:

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Templates tuned for Broad Listening

Some templates are designed to elicit the kind of contested, votable statements that make a good opinion landscape:

• Community deliberation — for open community input on a shared question
• Public opinion mapping — for surfacing and mapping where a group agrees and disagrees

Pick one of these from the Templates page when you know a project is headed for a public page.

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