SEPTEMBER, 2023

Throughout the year, Cortico has grown with the intention of enhancing our tools and providing a more useful and impactful experience for our partners. The work we have done with partners has provided important feedback for our growth and development and we are excited to share with you the evolution in our product vision and identity:

Meet Fora! We’re thrilled to unveil Local Voices Network (LVN)’s refreshed brand identity—our first step toward providing an enhanced, seamless experience across mobile and desktop. In the next few weeks and months, we will be retiring the LVN name and branding in order to launch Fora.

Fora is the plural of forum and it sends a powerful message about the work that our growing network of global partners is doing: creating spaces for listening to underheard stakeholders and connecting these voices to more informed decision-making.

We are eager to take advantage of the new technologies that have developed since Cortico was founded. We couldn’t have imagined the light speed advances in machine learning that gave rise to ChatGPT and other large language models; those technologies will soon be integrated into our platform while abiding by the design principles that guide all our work including the central importance of human-led processes that reinforce personal agency, a foundation of strong democracy.

Over the next few months and into 2024, we will introduce changes on our platform that enhance the experience within and beyond communities. Some details:

The Cortico team is building a more seamless workflow that connects our current features for listening, sensemaking, and sharing; leveraging state-of-the-art AI to increase the speed, scale, and efficiency of sensemaking in a human-led approach in which the AI serves as a powerful thought partner for humans doing the listening; and, creating a mobile app that will enable partners to organize conversations via their phones, with features that make it easier to invite conversation participants into the analysis process and to scale participation.

Through a 10-year cooperation agreement, the MIT Center for Constructive Communication plays an important role as a research collaborator for this effort.

We publicly announced Fora (fora.io) on September 7th at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria when Cortico Chair & Co-Founder Deb Roy gave a keynote related to the conference theme of Who Owns the Truth? 

Our work together is meaningful to all of us at Cortico. It is also the foundation upon which we are building this next iteration and we are grateful.

Stay tuned for exciting updates in the coming year and beyond.