Harmonica Is in Early Access Now

We're thrilled to announce the first public release of Harmonica, our tool for AI-powered async multiplayer sensemaking workshops. After months of development and testing, anyone can now try out our product without creating an account. Just click "Get Started" on our new landing page:

Harmonica | AI-powered Facilitation

Harmonica acts as a virtual facilitator by talking to your team, event guests or discussion participants 1:1 and using LLM to synthesize their responses. It's an alternative to forms and saves both you and participants time, builds healthy habits and reduces friction.

https://www.harmonica.chat

From this brand-new web app to participation in the latest Gitcoin Grants Round, there’s a lot to be excited about. Here’s everything you need to know.

This release marks a significant milestone in our journey, made possible by the incredible support we received through the CollabTech round in Gitcoin Grants 21 back in August. Finishing second with approximately $3,800 in total funding, we focused on a clear objective of enabling our users to create a session with any facilitation logic in minutes (without any prompt engineering involved).

We're proud to say we've delivered on that promise. The current version features:

• A streamlined session creation flow for hosts (using GPT-powered prompt generator)

• Mobile-friendly web chat UX for participants

• Session results page with automatic summary updates

• Hosts can edit prompts and interrogate results using GPT assistant

• Exporting session results to JSON files

• Free access without login

We're excited to announce our collaboration with our first institutional customer CMI — Martti Ahtisaari Peace Foundation, an independent Finnish NGO that works to prevent and resolve conflicts through dialogue and mediation. CMI is currently testing Harmonica as a tool for both internal team collaboration and external deliberative processes. Their mission aligns perfectly with our vision for Harmonica, and we're honored to support their important work.

This week marked another important milestone as we participated in the Metagov's Interoperable Deliberative Tools cohort workshop in San Francisco. Our frontend developer Jonas represented Harmonica, demonstrating our platform and engaging with other projects in the space. The workshop proved invaluable for understanding how to better integrate process cards developed by Aviv Ovadya and exploring interoperability opportunities with other tools.

Our new JSON export functionality is a direct result of insights gained from this program. We're excited about the potential for Harmonica's outputs to be utilized by other tools in the deliberative tech ecosystem, creating a more connected and efficient landscape for community decision-making.

While we're proud of our first public release, this is just the beginning. Our roadmap focuses on delivering the core promise of Harmonica: truly intelligent AI-powered facilitation. Over the next weeks, we'll be working on making it real:

1. Context-Aware Conversations

   • Implementation of RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

   • Using previous sessions as context

   • Workspaces and organizational context awareness

2. Enhanced Facilitation

   • AI agents for deeper dialogues (i.e. better questions based on previous responses)

   • Cross-pollination of ideas across participants

   • Library of templates curated by experienced facilitators

Our goal is to create a facilitation experience that goes beyond linear conversations (that currently don't differ that much from vanilla ChatGPT), enabling a more profound alignment and robust idea synthesis within teams and communities.

As we continue building, we're participating in the current Gitcoin's GG22 round for open-source apps. While we're currently ranked 6th among OSS apps, we face an interesting challenge: our supporter base is relatively small, which significantly impacts our potential matching funds due to the quadratic funding mechanism.

In quadratic funding, the number of contributors matters more than the size of contributions. This means that even a $1 donation can make a meaningful difference. Projects with 1000+ small contributions will receive significantly more funds from the round's matching pool of $300,000 than those with just a few dozen donations of equal total value.

1. Visit our Gitcoin page before November 6th.

2. Contribute any amount. Even small contributions go a long way in helping us secure a greater portion of the matching pool.

3. Spread the word. Share our Gitcoin page with your network to help us reach more supporters who believe in our vision of async sense-making and deliberation.

Every contribution, no matter how small, helps us build Harmonica as an open-source software for async sensemaking and deliberation.

We're incredibly grateful for the support that has brought us this far, and we're excited about the road ahead. Try out the public beta at https://www.harmonica.chat/ and let us know what you think!

Thank you so much for being part of our journey,

Artem on behalf of Team Harmonica