Sharing personal stories is a crucial part of how communities work, and how they might be strengthened or healed. The nationally renowned oral history project StoryCorps offers a mobile app that makes it easy to collect, aggregate, and share stories about any community.

Founded in 2003, StoryCorps is probably best known for its audio stories broadcast on National Public Radio, in which ordinary people are recorded interviewing each other in special storytelling booths (currently in Atlanta, Chicago and San Francisco, plus one booth that travels around the U.S.). Over 100,000 StoryCorps interviews have been recorded, and over 50,000 of these stories currently reside in the StoryCorps Archive (at the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, Washington D.C.).

But in 2014, StoryCorps made it easier for people to tell and share meaningful conversations and personal stories, anywhere. A Knight Prototype Fund grant enabled StoryCorps to develop and deploy an initial version of its mobile app (for iOS and Android smartphones and tablets). And then, StoryCorps founder David Isay won the $1 million TED Prize-- which helped take this and other StoryCorps efforts further.

On July 14, Knight announced an additional $600,000 two-year grant to support improvements to the app, and to expand its reach. The app is an important part of the StoryCorp strategy to become more widely accessible to people in underprivileged and underrepresented communities.

StoryCorps CEO Robin Sparkman explained that people can use the app not just for sharing stories and conversations about people's lives, but also for discussing local news and issues. So if you want to start or highlight a community conversation about a local topic, you could encourage community members to install the app, record their thoughts and experiences, and upload it to their online library at StoryCorps.me.

"Ideally, it would help bring local communities together more. It'd be a way for people to communicate with each other about all sorts of local or civic issues," said Sparkman. "It's also a way to remember people. If someone in the town passes a way, a beloved figure, people in the community could remember that person by sharing stories."

The app is modeled after the StoryCorps booth experience of meaningful conversations and personal storytelling. It's designed to create audio stories (not video, although you can upload a still photo to serve as a thumbnail for your story).

A crucial feature of the app is that it presents a list of suggested questions to prompt people to think and remember. This can make it easier to have meaningful conversations. But for more focused projects, you could come up with your own list of questions and distribute that to community members. (See the StoryCorps Question Generator for ideas for crafting great questions.)

"It's simply a way for people to have conversations with each other about any topic," said Sparkman. "Just go have a conversation with a neighbor or coworker. Discuss the issues in your community. Upload it to our site. If you did 20-25 of these interviews, you'd have a great compilation."

Once uploaded, stories can be tagged (which supports aggregation) and shared via social media, e-mail, website embedding, and other means.

This approach to fostering community conversations may help communities address contentious issues, such as development plans, aging in place or race relations. That's because the app was built with Storycorps' core ethics in mind, Sparkman explained.

"It's about being kind, thoughtful, and listening; trying to see our own humanity in others. If we spent more time listening to each other, we'd have more compassion for each other."

Sparkman cautions that so far the app is still in beta. "It's got some bugs, it's not perfect. But we can fix them, with support from our users, funders and donors."