Better discussions through restatement

Comment boards on blogs, news sites, and elsewhere are good at letting people speak. Reflect helps people listen.

Reflect makes a simple change to comment boards. Next to every comment, Reflect invites readers to succinctly restate the commenter's points. These restatements are shown in a bulleted list.

Simplicity can be powerful. Restatements can help show that someone is listening, help avoid conflicts that stem from misunderstandings, help other readers find takeaways in long discussions, and build community through a new way of interacting.

Reflect is free and open source.

Try Reflect
Sites using Reflect
We are seeking opportunities to pilot Reflect. Please email Travis [at] cs.washington.edu if you're interested.
Learn more about Reflect
  • Is This What You Meant? Promoting Listening on the Web with Reflect
    Kriplean, T., Toomim, M., Morgan, J. T., Borning, A., and Ko, A.
    ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012)
    pdf
  • Supporting Active Listening and Grounding on the Web through Restatement
    T. Kriplean, M. Toomim, J.T. Morgan, A. Borning, and A.J. Ko.
    Horizons track
    ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2011)
    pdf
  • A Tool for Supporting Reflection and Active Listening
    J.T. Morgan, T. Kriplean
    Presentation at Wikimania 2010
    description, slides
  • Is this what you meant? Design for effective participatory governance.
    T. Kriplean
    Panel on "Information Technology and Public Deliberation"
    Digital Government 2010
    video
  • Responding to and synthesizing public input
    T. Kriplean
    Panel on "How we work with government"
    Open Gov West, 2010, Seattle WA.
    video
Twitter stream (@_reflect)
About us

Reflect is a research project at the University of Washington.

This project is mainly funded by the National Science Foundation (grants IIS-0811210 and IIS-0966929). Allan and Inger Osberg also generously supported Travis in 2009-10 through the Osberg Endowed Presidential Fellowship in Engineering.

The project team includes: