Volunteer App Tester — Help Improve Innovative AI Communication Tools

Crossing Party Lines (CPL) provides opportunities, training, and support for civil, respectful discourse between Americans with dissimilar ideologies. Our primary offering is the CPL meetup regularly scheduled, facilitated meetings to which all are welcome. At our meetups, attendees discuss current hot topics while facilitators focus the meetings to teach and model skills and create a safe space for members to

• Be heard by and listened to by people with different political views.
• Express views without negative repercussions.
• Learn from one another through active listening.
• Develop curiosity about perspectives that may be new and unfamiliar to them.
• Find connection with members who espouse different views.
• Develop skills required for civil, respectful discourse.

In 2016, two groups named “Crossing Party Lines” started independently of one another on opposite ends of the country, only a few months apart. They joined forces to bring civil, respectful conversation to the rest of the country.,

Help us discover what works, what confuses people, and what needs to change

Crossing Party Lines is recruiting Volunteer App Testers to join our Apps and Agents team.

We are developing AI-powered applications and conversational agents that help people communicate more constructively across differences. Some tools allow people to practice specific communication skills. Others provide coaching, role-play, perspective-taking, or support during challenging conversations.

We need curious, observant testers who can try these tools, notice where they succeed or fail, and help us make them clearer, more useful, and more human.

You do not need to be a software developer or an AI expert. Strong testers ask good questions, pay attention to their experience, follow unexpected paths, and clearly explain what happened.

About The Work Crossing Party Lines has spent nearly a decade developing and teaching ways to help people with different political views understand one another without requiring agreement.

Our approach addresses two related challenges

• Affective depolarization the distrust, dislike, fear, and hostility people may feel toward those on the “other side”
• Cognitive depolarization the assumptions, oversimplifications, reasoning habits, and distorted perceptions that make it harder to understand people and issues accurately

Our AI applications combine generative-AI technology with CPL’s proprietary communication skills, teaching methods, concepts, and philosophy. The goal is to bring what we have learned beyond political conversations and into workplaces, families, community groups, and other areas of everyday life.

Crossing Party Lines is also preparing an application to Y Combinator as we explore how these tools could reach and serve a much larger audience.

What you’ll help us accomplish

Your feedback will help us answer questions such as

• Are the instructions easy to understand?
• Does the AI respond in a useful and appropriate way?
• Does the experience feel supportive rather than judgmental?
• Can people understand why a skill or suggestion might help?
• Does the app work for people with different communication styles and viewpoints?
• What happens when someone gives an unexpected, emotional, vague, or complicated response?
• Where do people become confused, frustrated, bored, or tempted to leave?
• Does the app teach something people can use outside the app?

What you’ll do

Depending on the stage of each project, you may

• Test early prototypes and more developed applications
• Follow structured testing scenarios
• Explore applications freely to uncover unexpected problems
• Test different inputs, viewpoints, tones, and conversational situations
• Document bugs, confusing instructions, awkward interactions, and inconsistent behavior
• Evaluate whether AI responses feel accurate, neutral, respectful, and helpful
• Suggest improvements to wording, workflow, coaching, and user experience
• Participate in team discussions about what should be changed
• Retest revised versions to see whether problems have been resolved
• Help us develop repeatable testing criteria for future applications

Some testing will focus on whether the technology works correctly. Other testing will focus on the quality of the conversation, teaching, coaching, and overall experience.

You may be a good fit if you

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