Inqwire Campfire makes it easy to facilitate group forms into meaningful topics that support people in learning from each other about life, increasing understanding between people, and growing wisdom together within families, communities, teams, in the classroom, and more.
Choose from a library that includes over 900 universal topics of life that anyone can speak to, then the app will walk you through exactly what to say and do to facilitate a safe and inclusive experience that leaves people with a greater sense of connection, purpose, and meaning in life.
Get a few people together and try out a 40-60 minute demo guided campfire session around the value of confidence. This guided campfire will give you a sample of what it's like to participate in a campfire that's facilitated by reading the scripts you get with the Inqwire Campfire app.
After participating in this campfire alone or with others, you'll have a better sense of what a campfire is like.
"This was awe-inspiring. Never had I encountered a group process where participants responded completely to such an elegant format, which drew deep, concise, real, alive responses." - Campfire participant
Chances to connect meaningfully with others can be hard to find, or fail to deliver the kind of experience that people are looking for.
Hosting Campfires is a great way to create more opportunities for meaningful connection within your own life and in the lives of others.
Inqwire Campfire is specifically designed to support productive and meaningful exchanges around universal topics of life that any person can speak to, regardless of their beliefs or backgrounds.
By hosting Campfires, you can create opportunities for people to get together across divides to restore common ground and a shared understanding of universal human experiences.
When you reflect on quality forms about life and exchange perspectives and wisdom with others, you are making sense of things, understanding how things work, and making meaning out of your life experiences.
We now know from 21st-century cognitive science that the sense that one’s life makes sense and has meaning, is correlated with just about every positive measure of well-being and anti-correlated with just about every negative measure of well-being there is.
Every person holds wisdom from their own unique life experiences. This wisdom can be essential for helping others who are going through similar or relevant life challenges.
Inqwire Campfires make it possible for participants to exchange their life wisdom with those who need it. Participants often report that hearing the perspectives of others gave them important and valuable personal insights.
"I am appreciating each one of these responses, and I cannot say that that is my experience in most groups. What I'm appreciating is that each person somehow voiced a particular way in which I might experience a challenge. Each person had their own language for it and channel for it, and they all fit in and have given me a fuller picture inside." - Campfire participant
The Campfire format enforces that everyone participates from direct experience, ensuring that everyone's contribution adds value. This makes Campfires highly inclusive.
The Campfire format also removes unsafe social dynamics. Participation is always optional, all answers are restricted to direct experience only, no input, advice, criticism, or feedback is allowed, and participants are instructed to protect their privacy when sharing. These and other constraints help to create a truly safe social environment even when bringing together people with very different cultures and beliefs.
"I had a strong experience that care was taken to protect each participant and each act of participation. The guidelines upfront helped us to experience the session as if we were alone. The guidelines for contributing and responding also went a long way towards making me feel safe and that i was not harming others." - Campfire participant
Emulative Thinking is an essential and powerful tool for facilitating meaningful exchanges about life.
But not all forms and questions are helpful or safe. inquiries in the form of questions, prompts, or thought experiments include harmful aspects that can create unsafe and counterproductive group experiences.
Fortunately, modern cognitive science has revealed how forms work and how they can be carefully designed to safely and productively engage minds to share perspectives and insights.
Inqwire Campfire is built on over a decade of research into the science of creating activity templates to create a one-of-a-kind tool for facilitating safe and productive exchanges about life.
The creation of the ELIZA chatbot in 1966, ELIZA, demonstrated that interacting with a computer that uses language to emulate a human can be harmful.
Modern AI chatbots present false information in a believable way, ask low quality and harmful question forms, all while creating the illusion that that they are as trustworthy as human experts. This can and does block our natural intelligence for making sense of reality and thinking in a clear and grounded way.
Inqwire is a company dedicated to empowering people and their own human natural intelligence. As part of this, Inqwire Campfire is intentionally designed without the use of generative LLM based AI, and does not pretend to be a person.
Everything about Inqwire Campfire is designed to restore, protect, and enhance the natural intelligence of a group for accurately sharing perspectives and life wisdom while supporting the processes required for reaching genuine insights.
Start hosting Campfires with friends, family, students, co-workers, or community members.
Inqwire Campfire is based on a synthesis of science from across fields that, taken together, contribute to a general understanding of what the brain needs for insight and learning. Learn more about our story.
If for any reason you aren't finding success with Inqwire Campfire, send us a message. We will do everything in our power to help you, and if we can't, we will refund the full amount of your purchase.
Yes, if you have questions about using the app or hosting successful Campfires, there is a trained support team standing by to help you with what you need. You can reach them through contacting support and someone will reply to help as soon as possible.
Inqwire Campfire is a fit for:
Inqwire Campfire is probably not a good fit for you if you're wanting to do this with a group of people that isn't open to the idea of exchanging perspectives or reflecting together about meaningful topics.
Many group formats have been developed to address circumstances where there is a failure of collective natural intelligence, such as conflicts, disconnection, animosity between groups, misunderstandings, failures to solve shared problems and navigate shared challenges, lack of engagement in group learning, as well as numerous symptoms of failures in collective natural intelligence.
But collective natural intelligence is like a chemical reaction that needs everything to go right for it to happen. Without addressing all the threats to collective natural intelligence, the reaction doesn’t go. Unless a group format fully addresses and removes the barriers, the format cannot reach the desired resolutions, insights, solutions, learning or other outcomes. Additionally, a group format that does not fully address the threats to natural intelligence is at risk of doing more harm than good.
Campfires use Inqwire's collaborative thinking format, which is unique in systematically addressing all the threats to natural intelligence, such as lack of inclusion, imposing biases, allowing confabulation, imposing time pressure on complex cognitive tasks, the wrong environment, not managing minds effectively, and safety. It’s because of this that participants are surprised that something that seems so simple can be so effective.
When participants tracked how they felt across measures of connection, empowerment, hope, safety, purpose, and self-worth, all participants felt better after a single Campfire.
This isn’t surprising because the Campfire format ensures that participants focus on things they care about. When people make sense of what they care about, their world becomes more navigable and it makes more sense. This means that participants get closer to being able to fundamentally navigate away from threat and towards what they value. That is why the sense that a person’s world makes sense correlates with virtually every measure of well-being.
The Campfire format enforces that everyone participates from direct experience, ensuring that everyone's contribution adds value. This makes Campfires highly inclusive.
One of the most common threats to collective natural intelligence is that group formats commonly fail to establish the safety required for the natural intelligence of participants.
A group format may lack safety if you feel pressured into participating, if you feel a sense of ‘group think’ where there is an expectation that you conform to the group or subordinate to an authority, if you feel pressured into crossing boundaries or doing things you’re uncomfortable with, if you feel pressured into revealing personal information, if you are getting unwanted feedback or advice, if you are being told that your experience of reality is wrong, if you are being analyzed or diagnosed, if you are being compared to others, if you are being excluded, singled out, ganged up on or talked down to.
Campfire participants consistently report that this was the safest they’ve felt in a group experience. How is this possible? The Campfire format removes unsafe social dynamics. Participation is always optional, all answers are restricted to direct experience only, no input, advice, criticism, or feedback is allowed, and participants are instructed to protect their privacy when sharing. These and other constraints create a truly safe social environment even when bringing together people with very different cultures and beliefs.
Start hosting Campfires with friends, family, students, co-workers, or community members.