As the year draws to a close, we find ourselves in a world full of uncertainty, amplified by the technical breakthroughs happening on a weekly basis, and unprecedented political challenges. The criminal invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing turmoil in the Middle East, almost simultaneous political crises in Georgia, France, Germany, and South Korea, and growing disillusionment of millions of American Democratic voters with their "party" paint a somewhat gloomy picture. And yet, all these disturbing manifestations of Moloch make us even more determined and focused on our mission to help communities find harmony and make collective sensemaking more accessible to everyone.
At Harmonica HQ, we've been looking back at our journey through 2024, counting not just the features we've shipped but also the new relationships we've started to build, and the small but meaningful wins that help us remain optimistic about humanity's capacity for dialogue and cooperation.
Thank you for ongoing support!
First of all, we want to express our profound gratitude for your contributions in the last Gitcoin Round. With over 500 contributions, we raised $7,051 in total! One of the most surprising and humbling moments came when we found ourselves ranked among the top 10 OSS projects. For a young project like ours, this level of community support was absolutely incredible. While some projects secured even larger grants with fewer contributions due to their contributors' Gitcoin Passport scores (a learning we'll definitely take into account for future rounds), we're incredibly grateful for every single person who demonstrated their belief in our mission.
As with the previous rounds, we're fully committed to deliver on the milestones outlined in our grant application: (1) Core reasoning capabilities and memory, (2) Improved session reports based on selected template and user data, (3) Less linear dialogues and cross-pollination between participants.
What's new in Harmonica
Since the last newsletter we've shipped some new features and quite a few QoL improvements:
🤓 New Backend
Switched from Make.com to proprietary backend (TypeScript + Vercel)
Moving to new backend enables us to start using agents and vector DBs for better reasoning
🔐 SSO Authentication
You can now log in and access all of your hosted sessions in one place
Seamless session management and history tracking
📑 Ready-to-Use Templates
Pre-built facilitation templates to address specific sensemaking and collaboration use cases:
Retrospectives, Brainstorming, Community Proposals, OKRs planning, SWOT analysis, Theory of Change, and a few others
Soon, these templates will also shape how session results are structured and presented!
📊 Working with Different Participant Groups
Collect participant data with customizable forms
Get deeper insights into participant groups / clusters
Coming soon: Filter and analyze responses based on properties
🎨 Improved User Experience
Page titles and session links with correct metadata
Updated Help Center and pro tips inside the app
Session Recap (template brief) displayed on the results page
Save Drafts before launching sessions
Session stats displayed correctly
Better exports to JSON, Markdown coming soon
Anonymous participants are easier to work with
More responsive and clean mobile UX
We've squashed many bugs, but there's still loads to squash! Please report them via #support channel on our Discord server or our Harmonica Support group on Telegram.
Positive feedback that keeps us going
We're energized by the growing impact our MVP is producing across different communities and organizations. Here are some highlights that keep us motivated:
As we mentioned in our previous post, we're collaborating with CMI, the renowned peace-building organization from Finland. They've recently launched a global stakeholder survey expected to receive 100+ responses in multiple languages - a true acid test for Harmonica's capabilities. Even more exciting, CMI recently presented Harmonica during a workshop with the UN Special Envoy's team in Yemen, generating significant interest in our approach to async sensemaking.
Although Harmonica doesn’t have any onchain functionality yet, we’re very excited to receive early positive signals from some web3 organisations. Working with Scroll has been particularly inspiring, as their new governance leadership is pioneering deliberation-first approach. We're particularly excited to collaborate with Antoine Vergne, who brings decades of experience in designing and running citizen assemblies across Europe. Together with RnDAO and a few professional delegates, we're exploring how async collective dialogues can increase participation and enhance decision-making in DAOs. In 2025 we're planning to double down on the specific needs of such communities, e.g. with custom UX for designing grant programs and reviewing applications.
We're especially grateful to our early adopters from relevant communities of practice such as Metagov, Citizen Collective (instigated by Jon Alexander) and Sensemaking Scenius (instigated by Kristen Pavle and Ronen Tamari). Your feedback has been instrumental in shaping Harmonica into a professional-grade tool that maintains the human touch in digital facilitation. Here's the recording of a recent town hall with amazing like-minded humans:
Overall, we're seeing growing interest from communities exploring new ways of stakeholder engagement, deliberative democracy activists and grassroots organizations (primarily UK-based) and distributed teams looking to upgrade their collaboration stack. The common thread here is the demand for better, faster, and cheaper facilitation, and the highest priority for us is to build a useful tool for professional facilitators, whether they run citizen assemblies or implement advanced project management at the intersection of Cynefin, Wardley Mapping and Team Topologies.
Interoperability in practice: laying out the foundations of AI-powered facilitation
We've spent the past few weeks deep in discussion with ML engineers, professional facilitators, and governance experts to understand how LLMs can meaningfully enhance facilitation while preserving its essential human elements. These conversations have led us to some exciting insights about the architecture of AI facilitation - and we're thrilled to announce that we're taking the next step by collaborating with Metagov and AI Objectives Institute on an open-source library of AI facilitation patterns.
This collaboration brings together technical expertise in AI development with deep experience in real-world facilitation and democratic processes. AI Objectives Institute plans to implement these patterns in Talk to the City, creating additional practical testbed for our shared library.
Our vision for AI facilitation centers on several key principles:
Goal-Oriented Sessions: Every session starts with clear objectives, helping both participants and AI understand what success looks like. The AI can use these goals to develop its facilitation strategy and potentially come up with original solutions.
Dynamic Response: Moving beyond simple Q&A, we're implementing systems that can analyze previous responses in real-time and generate relevant follow-up questions. This creates more natural conversation flows and helps surface important insights and outliers.
Cross-Pollination of Ideas: A core feature we're developing is the ability for the AI to connect relevant thoughts and perspectives between participants, fostering richer discussions and helping build consensus.
Flexible Facilitation Strategies: We're creating a library of facilitation tactics that the AI can deploy based on the session's needs - from ice breakers to deep-dive questions, from divergent thinking exercises to convergent rankings and bridging.
By developing these components as an open-source library, we're ensuring that other projects can benefit from and contribute to this codified facilitation wisdom. This approach allows us to pool expertise and resources while working toward our shared goal of making public sensemaking / deliberation more accessible and effective.
The library will include various facilitation modules, from non-violent communication patterns to structured deliberation techniques. In line with requirements of Metagov's IDT cohort, we're designing these components to be modular and interoperable, making it easy for different projects to adapt them to their specific needs while maintaining high standards for facilitating meaningful group conversations.
This collaborative approach represents a significant step forward in developing AI facilitation tools that truly serve the needs of communities and public institutions while ensuring transparency and democratic integrity.
What's Next for Harmonica
We're excited about upcoming events in February:
Our advisor Drea Gallagher will be participating in the workshop organized by Plurality Institute, Prosocial Design Network and The Council on Technology and Social Cohesion on February 27-28 in San Francisco
Two members of our team are looking to participate in the OECD's Co-Creation Bootcamp on February 25-26 in Lisbon
These opportunities will help us further refine Harmonica with input from some of the world's leading thinkers in collective intelligence and digital democracy.
And in Q1 2025, we're launching several exciting initiatives to bring Harmonica closer to facilitators:
Harmonica Tunings: Join our live demo sessions on Zoom where we explore different use cases for AI-powered facilitation. Each week, we'll dive into new use cases and possibilities unlocked by our tool.
Interviews with Experts: We're honored to interview leading voices in facilitation, governance and civic tech, including Andy Paice, Grace Rachmany, Antoine Vergne, Eloïse Gabadou Santiago, Danny Spitzberg, Liz Barry, Simone Maria Parazzoli, Nathan Hewitt, Antti Pentikainen, and many more inspiring practitioners.
Public Sensemaking: We're planning to run open, large-scale dialogues on timely global issues. These sessions will demonstrate how AI facilitation can help communities tackle complex challenges while bringing people together across differences.
Support Our Mission
As we continue developing our open-source sensemaking tool, we're approaching a critical phase in our lifecycle. Releasing Harmonica's MVP in early November enabled us to validate our key hypotheses re: the demand for AI-facilitated async workshops, and we're seeing clear paths to sustainable impact. At the same time, bootstrapping is hard and most of us have been working on Harmonica part-time. We're ready to switch gears to fully dedicate ourselves to this project, fill the critical roles in our team and serve more communities and organizations.
How you can help:
Direct Support
Contribute via Giveth (crypto)
Contribute via Open Collective (GBP), hosted by Social Change Nest
Investment Opportunity
In early 2025, we'll be raising a pre-seed round. We're seeking mission-aligned investors who share our vision for collective sensemaking with open core business model. If you know potential angels who might be interested in supporting a project like Harmonica, please connect us. We're particularly interested in meeting angels who understand the paradigm shift of AI agents and their crucial importance for the future of work and democracy.
As we wrap up 2024, we feel more energized and purposeful than ever. With each new partnership and collaboration, our vision becomes clearer and our conviction grows stronger. We're finding our tribe - passionate people and organizations who understand the importance of better collective sensemaking. Thank you for being part of this journey and helping us build a more useful tool for everyone.
Happy holidays!
Team Harmonica 🪗
