Powering discourse at scale
An open source video platform for small-group dialogue and deliberation.
Good dialogue doesn’t scale
People want a say in the decisions that affect them, and the tools meant to gather that input fall short. Town halls amplify the loudest voices. Comment forms produce volume without reasoning. Typical video platforms drop people into random breakouts with no shared structure and nothing captured at the end. Organizers are left choosing between quality and scale.
Frankly closes that gap.
How Frankly works
Structured by design.
Configure the agenda and event flow once, and it runs across many simultaneous breakouts.
Guided participation.
An embedded agenda and a talk timer keep each group balanced and on track, with no live facilitator needed in every room.
Balanced perspectives.
Breakouts are composed on criteria you set, so a range of views sits in every room.
Participation becomes output.
Polling, idea submission, and surveys capture input, and recordings and transcripts feed sensemaking tools.
Open source accountability.
Transparent, adaptable, and accountable to the public interest.
The result: Deliberation that produces outcomes, at any scale.
What you can run
Frankly runs structured group events of many kinds, from focus groups to statewide deliberations.
- Policy deliberations
- Issue forums
- Roundtables
- Citizens’ assemblies
- Town halls
- Focus groups
- Classroom discussions
Actively in use across civic, community, education, and workplace settings.
Built in the open
Frankly’s code is open source under the AGPL, so the platform stays transparent, adaptable, and accountable to the communities it serves. Anyone can run it, inspect it, or build on it.
Who’s behind it
Frankly is developed within the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and directed by Lawrence Lessig, founder of Creative Commons, Deliberations.us, and Equal Citizens.
JOIN THE BETA
Bring structured dialogue to your community
Help your community talk, listen, understand, and solve, together. Frankly is in closed beta and onboarding new organizations now. Email hello@frankly.org to request access.
Stay Connected
For updates about Frankly and related deliberative tools, sign up for updates from the Berkman Klein Center and select the box next to Deliberations.