When we are not blinded by partisan differences, we see that we are in fundamental agreement on some very important issues, and we can work together to solve them.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA (PRWEB) April 19, 2016
AllSides, a media technology company focused on revealing and bridging differences to elevate understanding, today announced that it has joined forces with Living Room Conversations, co-founded by Joan Blades, a former co-founder of MoveOn.org, to fight polarization through two new innovative online services.
This partnership brings together two pairs of seemingly incompatible things: left with right politics and online technology with in-person connection.
The first new solution, AllSides Dialog, rounds out the AllSides ecosystem for fighting polarization. While AllSides news curation and issues search, driven by technology and the crowd, bring together multiple points of view, AllSides Dialogs brings different people together.
Living Room Conversations complements AllSides’ services and is a major part of the AllSides Dialog puzzle. Living Room Conversations is designed as a platform for people to come together across differences. For example, Mark Meckler, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, and Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org, found common ground on criminal justice through this process. That led Blades to co-authoring an op-ed on criminal justice with Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform.
“Without the human element, it is too easy to dismiss or belittle differences,” said John Gable, Founder and CEO of AllSides and former staff member for George Bush 41 and three Senate Majority Leaders -- Howard Baker, Trent Lott and Mitch McConnell. “Our goal is to bring together this human element with information, perspective and analysis to create a new platform for understanding and working together. It is social engineering with positive impact – helping us really listen to and appreciate what each has to say so we can arrive at the very best decisions for ourselves and society.”
"When we are not blinded by partisan differences, we see that we are in fundamental agreement on some very important issues, and we can work together to solve them," said Joan Blades, co-founder of Living Room Conversations.
The Blades/Gable partnership doesn’t only bring left and right together, but also technology and relationships. Gable is a high tech entrepreneur who joined the original Microsoft Office team and led product management for Netscape Navigator. Blades, no stranger to high tech as co-founder of Berkeley Systems, is a mediator by training and passion.
From race riots in America to religious conflict over-seas, history shows us time and again the peril of a society that becomes so polarized that people can’t tolerate each other.
With our future in mind, Blades and Gable have also partnered to launch the non-profit initiative AllSides for Schools, giving educators a suite of tools and programs for teaching students how to consider and discuss topics with respect and reason so that they can make better decisions to build a more civil society and a better America.
Using AllSides Dialog, people with different viewpoints can participate in meaningful, respectful and reasonable conversations surrounding issues and the events of the primaries as we close-in on who the winning candidates will be for the 2016 presidential election. AllSides community members can join a civil, online dialog and come together through AllSides’ partnership with Living Room Conversations – a solution that allows people to leverage their social networks to engage friends and friends of friends in a self guided conversation on a chosen topic.
A new Pew Research study1 just released underscores the growing public skepticism in the political system. According to the study, just 35 percent of voters say that the primaries produce the best qualified nominees, and that more than half (51 percent) say the future for the next generation will be worse.
The same study reveals that since 2007, the percentage of both Republicans and Democrats who express a good deal of confidence in the public’s political wisdom has fallen sharply. Currently, just 35 percent of Republican voters and 32 percent of Democratic voters have that positive sentiment, down from 61 percent and 58 percent, respectively, nine years ago.
More About AllSides Patented Technology
AllSides uses the power of crowd-wisdom and sophisticated algorithms to reveal all perspectives on the news. Building from its bias detection and display patent and its topics on demand technology, AllSides solicits regular people from across the political spectrum to rate the perspectives of different articles without knowing the source. These ratings of individual articles provide an overall bias rating that AllSides then uses to present different perspectives. The website incorporates multi-partisan views, crowd participation and news sources, think tanks and policy groups across the web to counteract bias and ensure greater balance in news and information.
About AllSides, Inc.
AllSides couples wisdom-of-the-crowd technology and the best statistical research and methodologies available, enabling an online movement to take back control of information by exposing bias and presenting different points of view. AllSides was founded by a multi-partisan team of seasoned industry leaders with a track-record of paving the way for innovation, having served companies such as Microsoft, Apple, AOL and Netscape, media outlets including CBS MarketWatch and several political campaigns at the presidential, senate, state and local level. Based in San Francisco, California, AllSides is committed to empowering people to digest a variety of perspectives and gain a balanced view of news, opinions and important issues. As a result, they can then make informed decisions that affect their individual lives and, ultimately, society at-large. AllSides' technology is available to consumers and teachers directly through the AllSides.com website and through licensing agreements with education and media partners. For more information, visit http://www.AllSides.com.
Media Contact:
Andrea Corry
TopMind PR
(925) 640-5482
andrea(at)topmindpr.com