Product/Design : Unchat
What Problem Does It Solve?: Overcomes the loss of visual signals and etiquette when conversation is moved to the Web.
How Does It Do That?: Unchat allows users to share the task of moderating their own online discussions. It improves the quality of conversation and decision-making inside the virtual conference room by allowing a group to see itself around the table and structure the rules of its own conversation.
Why Is It Different? : While there are many group conversation tools, only Unchat lets the group see itself and self-moderate its own conversations, setting up and changing the rules as they go.
Who Should Use It? : Organizations and groups doing collaboration, participation, dispute resolution, education and conferencing across a distance. Unchat is ideal for:
- Citizen participation and consultation
- Focus groups and polling
- Global distance learning and enhancing classroom learning
- Knowledge management and exchange
- Team collaboration and group work
Why?: This is not chat as we have known it, but Unchat, where users have a choice over the type, style, timing and rules of their discussion. Unchat:
- Offers a unique interface to allow participants to visualize the group and to see themselves within it.
- Permits real-time and asynchronous communication for the group
- Lets the participants set up and change the rules of their conversation without any technical expertise
- Encourages participants to share the role of moderating the group by passing the moderation tools from user to user
- Allows users to “shout” to gain attention, a limited number of times
- Informs communications with integrated content libraries
- Allows for group voting, polling an quizzing
- Allows users to talk privately with other group members
Implementations: Unchat has been commercially deployed to a variety of flagship educational and civic clients, including: Yale Law School, Trinity Church Worldwide, Manchester College, MacNeil Lehrer Productions, MIT, Wayne State University, the Kettering Foundation.
Other Potential Uses : Unchat has tremendous applicability for conferencing and learning in the corporate as well as educational and civic domains. It is an ideal tool for widespread citizen consultation. The software makes an excellent adjunct to voice and video-conferencing as a way to manage an informed parallel conversation.
More Detailed Description :
- Imagine a conference call where everyone gets to be heard…
- Imagine a meeting where everyone takes part in the decision making…
- Imagine a working group where participants design their own ground rules…
The barrier to effective distance collaboration is not technology; it is a misunderstanding of the ways people work and learn together. The Unchat software models the structures of face-to-face communication in an on-line environment to enable productive collaboration across boundaries. Our unique patented process moves beyond simply convening participants. It improves the quality of conversation and decision-making inside the virtual conference room by allowing a group to see itself around the table and structure the rules of its own conversation.
Unchat solves the problem encountered in any meeting where not all of the participants are physically present – the loss of the etiquettes and cues that make face-to-face interactions so productive. By enforcing rules of moderation yet allowing participants to take turns moderating themselves, by creating a controlled structure yet allowing participants to interrupt and talk privately with each other, Unchat marries the speed and reach of the Internet with the effectiveness of real-life meetings.
Based on cutting-edge democratic communications theory, Unchat is predicated on the idea that users are far more likely to be satisfied with decisions made consensually and according to rules they set themselves.
Lead Designer : Beth Simone Noveck and Benjamin R. Barber
Sponsors: Unchat is a project of Bodies Electric LLC: Democratic Solutions for a Wired World
For More Information: http://www.unchat.com or e-mail bnoveck@nyls.edu
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