ABSTRACT
One practical problem in large group multi-party interactions concerns the audibility of emerging public speech. During the information meetings within the participatory democracy project, issues related to audibility are dealt with by way of technical devices and a turn-taking system managed by professionals, regulating bids for speaking in turns in microphones. When participants nevertheless self-select and/or do not have access to a microphone, the professionals treat this as prompting a possible trouble of hearing for the ensemble of the participants by initiating “open-class” repair, soliciting a repeat of the trouble source turn. Furthermore, the professionals recurrently extend the repair sequence by repeating the repaired turn in public. Whereas this practice is treated as establishing an institutional orientation to the participants’ right to produce and access emerging talk as public talk, it also constitutes a slot for retrospectively modifying aspects of emerging (politically) delicate actions.
