Jigsaw

Can AI help us move from "memes to meaning”? 🎧 Listen to the full episode on @ballotpedia to hear @yasmind and @ScottWRasmussen discuss how AI was used to increase civic voice for thousands of Americans during We the People, and why the results give us a reason to be hopeful in 2026. youtu.be/Q2l1oUOcIWk?si…

Thank you for joining us on an exciting 🚘 journey 🚘 in 2025, full of new projects, partnerships, and research. Looking forward to even more in 2026!

We are deeply grateful to the many partners, contributors, developers, and community members who have shaped Outline into the global resource it is today, and are even more excited for it to thrive and grow under the stewardship of the Outline Foundation. Read more about the future of Outline in our blog: medium.com/jigsaw/introdu…

📣Today, we are thrilled to announce that as of January 2026, Outline is moving from its first home at Jigsaw to a new, independent, nonprofit organization: the Outline Foundation. 📣 The Outline Foundation, led by Shabnam Aslam, will be the steward of the Outline portfolio, cultivating its #opensource technology and future development and ensuring that Outline remains a trusted resource shaped by the people who rely on it.

If you have ever read a 📰 frontline account from the civil war in Myanmar, the Women Life Freedom protests in Iran, or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, you may have only seen it because of Outline. Since 2018, Jigsaw’s Outline technology has been a vital lifeline, empowering over 30 million people to access the open internet and share information freely each month.

Here are the age-old constraints to large conversations that we focused on addressing: 💡How do we ensure everyone has a turn to speak? 💡How do we ensure people feel comfortable opening up? 💡How do we surface shared understanding? 🎧 Listen in to Jigsaw CEO @yasmind and @semafor 's @ReedAlbergotti discuss how AI may offer a new way to engage both at scale and in depth.

That was the design challenge the Napolitan Institute brought to Jigsaw in the run up to America's 250th Anniversary: ⚡Can we convene a virtual focus group that is representative of Americans and enable them to have a back-and-forth to see what they think?⚡

Why do conversations break down when they become very large? Put simply, everyone can't take part. You can imagine the lively back-and-forth of a good conversation between 2 people, maybe 20 people, but definitely not 200 people. So imagine designing for 2,400 — and having 94% of participants saying afterwards that the conversation worked for them

Instead of reducing 10,000 quotes and 1.6 million words into a TL;DR, we built a process that preserves the whole conversation. You can explore it all today (and see how how your own opinions compare to those who participated) 👉 freedom.wethepeople-250.org.

One clear learning is that people crave the opportunity to speak and feel heard. A typical participant spent over an hour sharing their views and engaging with those of others. 89% of participants felt that a process like this could help more American voices be heard.

For years, public opinion research has required trade-offs: depth or breadth; stories or statistics. ⚖️ Today, we’re sharing how Jigsaw and the Napolitan Institute bridged those gaps during our We the People pilot. 🇺🇸

Earlier this week, I was honored to participate in the showcase for Google @Jigsaw's "We the People" AI project in Bowling Green. It is incredible to see local innovation like "What Could BG Be" spark a new national form of civic dialogue. Looking forward to seeing this project take shape!

💬 What distinguishes a meaningful conversation from one that feels shallow? As we wrap up the pilot for We The People, we’re hearing that ➡️ 94% of participants said the personalized, AI-generated follow-up questions helped them examine their ideas in greater depth. ⬅️ That’s one mark of a truly meaningful conversation versus a surface-level one. We’ll share a full update on the pilot soon! For now, take a look at this example of how the AI-generated follow up looks to participants:

Listen to the full episode: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rec…

Designing spaces where people feel heard could change how we connect, disagree, and understand each other. Jigsaw CEO @yasmind reveals on the SHIFT Podcast with @StrongReporter that during early testing for We The People, 91% of participants in a 200-person conversation told us they felt represented by the process. This was our 💫 North Star and it gives us a lot of hope for how conversations can be designed with AI to help us find where we agree and disagree with each other.

Every opinion has a story behind it. Using AI, Jigsaw and the Napolitan Institute are reimagining what a focus group looks like as a national conversation to capture “the why” behind what thousands of Americans think about ‘Freedom and Equality’ as we approach the nation’s 250th anniversary. Swipe through to see how focus groups are key to understanding public opinion.

What does it take for a large-scale, high-stakes conversation to be effective? [Spoiler alert: thoughtful design makes the difference!] We asked 22 facilitators from around the world to dream big. The result? A coauthored, community roadmap about how #AI can strengthen group conversations. 🌐🤝 services.google.com/fh/files/blogs…

ECH is complex to roll out, but that challenge is what makes it worth solving together. We’ll keep sharing what we learn. If you’re curious about encryption roll out, check out: stats.labs.apnic.net/edns

ECH builds on that progress. It hides the domain names you visit, closing one of the internet’s last major privacy gaps.

Even with HTTPS, your online activity isn’t as private as it seems. Some details, like the websites you visit, can still be exposed. A new encryption standard called Encrypted ClientHello (ECH) can (and we believe will!) close that gap. Here’s what we’ve learned while working to make it real. 👇 medium.com/jigsaw/a-more-…