Deliberations

I've been playing around with a new service called YackPack. With it, a group can be assembled who can have an asynchronous many-to-many conversation using voice and text. The service remembers the voice clips and can reconstitute them as a continuous conversation. The interface is iconic and provides the illusion of presence even though, like a threaded forum discussion, participants drop their messages in at a succession of different times.

I've exposed my cohort taking Innovate Practice & Emerging ICT to it and the response has been favourable. Unfortunately, the service is still quite buggy and does some strange things, but that doesn't undermine its potential. I see it particulary useful for adding presence to asynchronous communiation and affording a fuller, more personal engagement than is achievable with text-only discourse.

My particular interest is in the arena of deliberative democracy where a representative sample of citizenry gathers to hammer out an understanding of an issue. On first blush, this technology would appear to have use in enabling people to tell a story more naturally.

I'd like to see this tie into a mobile service, which I think would make it huge.

I have one large question to ask: who owns the conversation? Ideally, the person who sets up each conversation (it's called a pack in Yackpack) should maintain control of it, for example to back it up. But no such feature is currently offered. This is a serious omission.