Once a year, AllSides hosts “AHIP,” or All Hands In Person, our staff retreat and strategy session. Getting together once a year is both an important opportunity for our team to strategize and connect, and simply a blast. We are a fully remote team that works hard, so it is an extra special joy for us to get together in person.
This year we convened in Orlando, Florida. Here is a rough overview of what we did, plus some fun photos.
Why is AllSides Remote?
AllSides from its early days set up and now continues to run and grow a remote team across the nation, even internationally, in order to combat our own biases and filter bubbles.
From city dwellers to rural residents to suburbanites, conservatives to liberals and everything in between, our diversity is both philosophical and personal. We have employees spanning the U.S. in places including the Midwest, the Pennsylvania Rust Belt, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, the Mountain West, and the South, as well as employees abroad, in Hungary and Portugal.
This remote setup helps us better offer you the full picture with balance and integrity, so you can decide for yourself.
Strengthening Our Core Products
A major focus of the 2026 retreat was improving on existing tools and building new ones to power AllSides’ core offerings.
We held an internal hackathon dedicated to developing tools that strengthen and optimize:
- Balanced news creation
- Media Bias Ratings surveys and management systems
- Media literacy tools for classrooms and communities.
Several promising workflow tools and prototypes for eventual user-facing tools emerged from these team sessions, and they are now moving into further development to enhance our core offerings — and provide new ones.
Advancing Roundtables Technology
AllSides is not only a bias ratings organization — we are also a dialogue and civic engagement platform.
At the retreat, we:
- Demoed a new tool designed to enhance our Roundtables insights platform
- Worked on a turnkey Roundtables prototype to make implementation easier for partners
- Held an internal Living Room Conversation to practice civil discourse among team members.
These sessions reinforced something core to our mission: meaningful dialogue across differences requires both strong facilitation and thoughtful technology.
Cross-Functional Collaboration — And Some Fun, Too
Even as a remote organization, we collaborate constantly across teams — editorial, technology, marketing, B2B, and partnerships. But there is unique value to in-person, cross-functional work, and we held numerous meetings to align on 2026 product and editorial priorities and improve coordination between the bias, news, dialogue, and tech teams.
Of course, we also had some fun, too. We baked in team dinners, a golf outing, and plenty of time to connect. What may not be apparent from the outside is that many AllSides employees truly consider each other friends. We may have met through our shared mission, but we have forged true camaraderie even across geographic and ideological differences. Our internal bonds strengthen our ability to model what we advocate publicly: that collaboration and mutual civility is possible across differences.
Why In-Person Matters for a Remote, Diverse Team
AllSides is intentionally remote. Our distributed structure allows us to recruit talent from across the country and maintain a team that reflects a wide range of political perspectives, life experiences, and professional backgrounds.
But diversity across geography and ideology makes in-person time even more valuable. We are sorry that some of our team members couldn’t make it — like Beth, Nikita, Rudy, and Ekatarina — and hope to catch them next time.
Bringing the team together doesn’t just allow for deeper strategic direction and more creative problem-solving, but also for an opportunity to connect with and enjoy each other.
The 2026 retreat was energizing, and a reminder that our credibility and innovation is not just built through systems and tools, but through true relationships.
We’re excited to implement the ideas generated during our time together and to continue strengthening the AllSides ecosystem in the year ahead.
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