Enables large groups of passers-by to engage in ongoing spontaneous conversations.
![Heckle at the National Theatre](http://saulalbert.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/5977842025_d20aa2622c_o-1024x684.png)
Heckle augments conversations by letting people catch up with what is being talked about visually – providing a user-contributed flow of relevant texts, tweets images, videos, websites overlaid on a live video feed of the event.
Developed with The People Speak to augment their public conversational performances, Heckle lets participants use a web app to contribute to a live visual summary of the conversation so far, so that new people can get involved at any time in the course of a discussion.
Heckle also provides a post-event visual timeline of the conversation, so over the last 7 years, The People Speak have been building a searchable, participant-annotated video archive of spontaneous conversations.
![A post-event visual summary A post-event visual summary](http://saulalbert.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/5985213086_0e25b84cbb_o-158x300.png)
![Schematic of a Heckle set-up Schematic of a Heckle set-up](http://saulalbert.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/heckle_setup-300x181.png)
Credits & Links
- Heckle was developed with Wojciech Kosma at The People Speak.
- See The People Speak’s Heckle project page.
- Heckle also has a voting system mode to help turn open discussion into decision-making. Chris Dixon wrote a very detailed review of our Who Wants to Be…? show that documents Heckle’s use and its many features very well.
- Heckle has been used in two research projects into conversation and media/event metadata: Conversational Annotation and Heckling at Ontologies.