Talk to the City

Qualitative analysis, simplified

Talk to the City (T3C) distills large-scale qualitative data while preserving the richness of each piece of information and perspective. It resolves the trade-off between large-scale data collection and in-depth discussion. Talk to the City has been deployed in national-level consultations — including usage by the government of Taiwan — and has capabilities beyond existing commercial solutions.

T3C saves 100s of hours of analysis by:

  • Processing unstructured text, interviews, and video, as well as structured data from digital tools and surveys

  • Clustering, labeling, and organizing key themes and points of difference discussed

  • Providing an interactive interface for exploring the data from a group level down to full individual quotes

  • Summarizing human opinions while preserving nuance, not just factual data

  • Preparing summaries, visualizations, and reports

Case Studies

National consultations in Taiwan

We collaborated with Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs (moda) to use T3C for analyzing large response datasets on a variety of topics, including AI policy in the 2023 AI Assemblies, same-sex marriage, and party platforms in the 2024 election (Kuomintang, Democratic Progressive Party). T3C appealed for its preservation of the nuance in different respondents' opinions, compared to moda's existing Polis-based process. moda now hosts its own instance of T3C, and we're expanding the collaboration to include producing reports for the Ministry of Education's Let's Talk initiative. Full case study: Amplifying Voices: Talk to the City in Taiwan

Democratic inputs with Chatham House

AOI partnered with Chatham House and vTaiwan on their Recursive Public project, funded by OpenAI's Democratic Inputs grant, to use an experimental alternate T3C interface for semantic clustering of large-scale survey responses. Inspired by past vTaiwan work, the project involved 1000 participants in a new deliberation process, to identify their priorities for AI governance and how they approached collective decision-making on specific issues.

Broad Listening for the Tokyo Gubernatorial Election

Japanese researchers used T3C to poll Tokyo residents about their policy needs in advance of the 2024 Tokyo gubernatorial election, in a series of reports with 1000 respondents. The pilot introduced ‘Broad Listening’ to the world and created an opportunity for groups with different ways of thinking to come to increased understanding with one another.

Union Leaders in the United States

We’ve partnered with leaders of a California healthcare workers union to poll members on their priorities for a series of three negotiations with the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Giving People a Voice with Heal Michigan

We partnered with Silent Cry, a non-profit serving formerly incarcerated people, to analyze a series of video interviews on the challenges faced by formerly incarcerated individuals when reintegrating after a sentence. T3C was able to capture and help explore the nuanced experiences and challenges faced by formerly incarcerated individuals, highlighting common issues such as digital literacy, job access, and housing discrimination. T3C surfaced trends and core perspectives, as well as helped facilitate direct communication of these challenges to local lawmakers, advocating for meaningful change.

“Back in 2014, it was impossible to interview a mini public of people and aggregate their ideas while preserving the full nuance. But now, with Talk to the City’s help, that cost has been reduced to essentially zero. It’s broad-listening, and it can change the nature of this recursive public.”

— Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s 1st Minister of Digital Affairs and co-author of Plurality.net

Get in touch

To explore using Talk to the City for your work or within your organization, get in touch at hello@objective.is

Maybe you’re —

  • A product manager or engineer with thousands of pieces of user feedback, bug reports, or interviews who wants to better understand what their user base really needs.

  • An analyst or consultant who wants to save time while conducting in-depth research and building context on a broad area of data and perspectives

  • A social worker with a pile of data or hours of interviews to review to understand the conditions of those you’re helping

  • An executive or leader who wants to make smarter decisions driven by real organizational data and business intelligence

  • A culture builder or community creator who wants to get a pulse for what’s going on in their organization

  • An official or worker in public policy or health who wants to better understand the public they represent

Talk to the City is live at talktothecity.org where you can explore real-world implementations. For further information on current usage of the project, see our Executive Summary or check out our Open-source Github repo.