Dialogue
AllSides Roundtables™️
Build understanding together
Connect with real people and transform the debate from us vs. them to us vs. the problem.
How people are using Roundtables
Communities
Individuals, organizations, and elected officials connect with, engage, and better understand their communities around relevant topics.
Workplaces
Businesses facilitate better decision making across teams while fostering better listening, collaboration and a healthier work culture.
Researchers
Researchers discover original insights using our deliberative group process – like focus groups but with more natural (honest) dialogue with more people in less time.
Journalists
Journalists and media more easily and frequently engage directly with their audience, and can report on what voters really think.
Upcoming events
More Roundtables coming soon
Research Reports
AllSides Roundtables post-event reports treat large-scale structured deliberative groups not only as an intervention, but as a measurement tool. AllSides’ Roundtable research uses a mixed-methods design to examine how Americans understand, explain, and respond to issues facing society.
Recent Roundtables
Carmel, Indiana Housing Affordability Roundtable
March 5, 2026 • 60 participants
Hosted by Project Civility and Carmel Current
Civics for Colorado
March 11, 2026 • 10 participants
Hosted by Civics for Colorado
Media Polarization and Digital Wellbeing
April 4, 2026 • 20 participants
Hosted by Living Room Conversations Youth Council
National Roundtable on Freedom and America
April 7, 2026 • 31 participants
Hosted by AllSides, Living Room Conversations, Listen First Project, and National Week of Conversation
National Roundtable on Healthcare in America
May 4, 2026 • 9 participants
Hosted by AllSides
How it works
AllSides Roundtables breaks up to thousands of people into small-group, guided video discussions of 4-6 participants that invite people with differing political views to engage respectfully on meaningful topics.
Want to host a Roundtable? We’ll help you choose a topic, recruit participants, run the event, and share insights afterward.
1. Set up
- Choose a conversation topic from over 150 existing discussion guides or we’ll create a custom guide for you
- Schedule the event
- Recruit participants
- Prepare pre-event information and introductory materials
- The platform handles registrations, participant data, and reminders
2. Host the event
- Dozens, hundreds, or thousands of participants join the video dialogue, receive instructions, and are split into diverse groups of 4-6
- Small group discussions foster listening and civil dialogue, last 45-75 minutes (no facilitator needed)
3. Follow-up
- To participants: automated emails with thank you, event statistics, perspectives summary of all conversations, and calls to action
- To organizers: dashboard of insights including email addresses, survey results, AI summaries and analysis, plus contact info for follow-ups
Why work with AllSides?
Over the years, we’ve partnered with AllSides on bias audits, which not only helped us produce a more balanced publication, but built trust with our audience — and increased our readership.
So, when we tried Roundtables, we knew we were in good hands. What surprised us was how eager people were to actually talk with each other — the conversations gave us insights and new content we’d never get from polls or comment sections.
FAQ
Why join an AllSides Roundtable?
If you’re interested in political debates or solving problems in your community, it’s better to gather face-to-face than debate in social media comments. Social media platforms share several issues that impede constructive conversation: algorithms prioritizing engagement and addiction, echo chambers where people only hear people on their side, complete anonymity allowing people to say nasty things without considering the person on the other end, and there being too many voices in general—our brains were never meant to process millions of opinions at once. AllSides Roundtables keeps the 'town' part of the town square—face-to-face small group conversation—and combines it with the best parts of the internet—the diversity, getting to talk to people from across the nation and world, and scalability to access so much data about an issue at once.
What makes AllSides Roundtables different from other video conferencing platforms?
AllSides Roundtables is specially designed for conversing and problem solving across differences. The platform can automatically “mismatch” online participants with those who may have different beliefs and experiences than them. There’s also a built-in discussion guide proven to facilitate fruitful discussions. Another feature is the "talk timer" that encourages those who haven't spoken to step up and those who have to step back and leave space for others. Lastly, AllSides Roundtables can produce a thorough after-event report that surfaces all of the perspectives from the conversation, enabling decision makers to take all perspectives into account, ensuring this isn't just another video call, it actually makes your voice heard.
Will I be attacked for sharing my perspective? What about trolls?
AllSides Roundtables has a number of guardrails built in to mitigate negative experiences. All participants agree to listen and engage respectfully and read conversation agreements together out loud. All breakout rooms have the ability to call an administrator in for help, but if someone is being inappropriate they can also vote the person out of the group and they will not be allowed to rejoin the event.
How do AllSides Roundtables use AI? Are the discussions recorded?
The discussions are typically recorded and AllSides Roundtables uses AI voice matching to anonymously transcribe the conversations using labels like [Speaker 1]. AllSides Roundtables uses in-house AI to organize the transcripts into paragraph form for the post-event report. Everything in the post-event report is linked to a real quote from the event.