realtalk@Boston
realtalk@Boston is a collaboration between the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, Cortico, and local community organizations. Building on an earlier pilot in the lead up to the 2021 mayoral election, the 2024–25 initiative continued to expand on the promise of amplifying the voices of Boston residents who are often underheard by current civic processes.
Listen to a medley of Boston residents reflecting on their questions about the city’s future and their place in it.
Explore the latest realtalk@Boston collection, bringing together over 250 voices across the city in conversations hosted by community organizations in 2024–25.
This work builds on Real Talk for Change, a 2021 initiative shaped by 60+ conversations with more than 320 Boston residents ahead of the mayoral and city council elections. Explore the Real Talk for Change Portal.
realtalk@Boston is a citywide listening initiative led by the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, in collaboration with Cortico and community organizations across Boston. At its heart is the concept of a Listening City: a city that makes room to hear its residents — not through surveys or town halls, but through small-group conversations hosted by trusted community leaders.
In 2024–25, the realtalk@Boston cohort brought together 253 participants across 50 hours of conversation, working with 11 community organizations to surface 47 conversation themes and publish a public portal where anyone can listen.
The Challenge
Many civic processes make it hard for everyday experiences to meaningfully shape public understanding, especially for people whose perspectives are often underheard. Input is often fragmented, rushed, or reduced to soundbites, leaving little space for nuance or context.
The realtalk@Boston team set out to explore what it might look like to create a sustained listening channel for the city, one rooted in real conversation and grounded in how people experience the city day to day.
The Approach
Local community organizers hosted and facilitated small-group conversations using shared prompts about belonging, daily challenges, sources of support, and hopes for Boston’s future.
With participants’ permission, conversations were recorded and transcribed. The realtalk@Boston team then engaged in a sensemaking process that combines human listening and AI tools to analyze conversations. They reviewed transcripts, highlighted resonant moments, and surfaced connections across the collection.
The Results
The result is realtalk.boston, a public listening portal where anyone can hear Boston residents in their own voices and explore themes that cut across neighborhoods and communities. The site invites the public, journalists, and civic leaders to listen directly to lived experience, making it easier to hear how people across the city really talk about shared concerns like safety, access, care, and belonging.
This work builds on an earlier Real Talk initiative led by MIT CCC during the 2021 Boston mayoral and city council elections, when more than 320 residents participated in facilitated conversations that shaped civic debate and electoral decision-making.
Listen to a few of those voices here.
Taken together, these efforts show how civic listening can function as shared infrastructure: creating a public record of community experience that can be returned to and learned from over time.
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