On March 26th of this year, I gave a presentation at a luncheon entitled “The Future of the Internet.” (Not to be confused with the great book by Jonathan Zittrain of the same name.) The event, which was hosted by the Center for Policy on Emerging Technology in DC, was fascinating and I was glad to have the opportunity to participate. The title of my talk was “Hometown Baghdad and Beyond: A Case Study in Global Conversations.” I used my time to review some of the lessons we learned about fostering meaningful online conversations while distributing Hometown Baghdad on the web.   It then moved on to touch on how we used those lessons to create the Qwidget.  Check out my slides below:

As you can see, the line from creating and distributing Hometown Baghdad to the creation of the Qwidget is a direct one.  Our mission has always been to create meaningful conversations.  The Qwidget is simply the most recent, and most effective, incarnation of this drive.

[Update: Slideshare seems to have some formatting problems with the slides.  I'll try to get that fixed.]

Welcome to the official blog of the Qwidget. Sound like another boring blog about an upcoming web tool? Not so fast. You see, with the Qwidget, we are trying to change the world.  We are trying to alter the very way that people interact online, the way people talk to each other, the way that people meet each other, the way we think about each other, and the way we treat each other.  But we’re not going to try to accomplish all of that in one fell swoop.  We’re just going to build a widget, a Qwidget rather, that makes starting conversations online easier, more tempting and more common.

This blog will cover the process of launching and growing the Qwidget.  It should probably stop there but it won’t.  While we may be laser focused on our product, we are also driven by our mission to create dialogue.  So this blog will include our thoughts on how people currently interact and meet each other online.

I want to lay out some of the beliefs that led us to create the Qwidget.  And I want to make some promises that will guide us on our mission.

Beliefs:

• The web has the power to break down many of the false stereotypes and ignorance that keep the world divided.
• The web has a long, long way to go before it delivers on that promise.
• People are social beings and, in the right circumstances, like to interact and talk to each other.
• If we create the right circumstances, we can make dialogue more fun for more people.
• There is an art to asking good questions that gets people to open up.
• Dialogue can change the world.

Promises:

• We’re going to think big and start small.
• Creating dialogue will motivate us first and foremost at all times.
• We will constantly work to make the Qwidget more engaging, more fun and more useful, and thus a better tool to change the world.
• We will always spell ‘dialogue’ with a ‘ue’ at the end while respecting those who use the alternate ‘dialog’ spelling.