This is the first article of a 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berh rster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Thanks, Guido for being on the Polis project.
Enjoy the read on the work Guido has been doing over the past months,
Mike
A team lead by Raoul Kramer/
BetaBreak is currently adapting
Polis for
evaluation and testing by several Dutch provincial governments and central
government ministries.
Guido Berh rster (author of this article) who is an employee at
Fre(i)e Software GmbH has been involved in this project as the main
software developer. This series of blog posts describes how and why Polis was
initially modified and adapted, what issues the team ran into and how this
ultimately lead them to start a new Open Source project called
Particiapp
for accelerating the development of alternative Polis frontends compatible to
but independent from the upstream project.
Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series
- Introduction (this article)
- Initial evaluation and adaptation
- Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
- Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
- Current status and roadmap
Polis - The Introduction
What is Polis?
Polis is a platform for participation which helps to gather, analyze and
understand viewpoints of large groups of participants on complex issues. In
practical terms participants take part in conversations on a predefined topic
by voting on statements or submitting their own statements (referred to as
comments in Polis) for others to vote on
1.
Through statistical analysis including machine learning participants are sorted
into groups based on similarities in voting behavior. In addition,
group-informed and overall consensus statements are identified and presented to
participants in real-time. This allows for participants to react to and refine
statements and either individually or through a predefined process to come to
an overall consensus.
Furthermore, the order in which statements are presented to participants is
influenced by a complex weighting system based on a number of factors such as
variance, recency, and frequency of skipping. This so called comment routing
is intended to facilitate a meaningful contribution of participants without
requiring them to vote on each of a potentially huge number of statements
2.
Polis open-ended nature sets it apart from online surveys using pre-defined
questions and allows its users to gather a more accurate picture of the public
opinion. In contrast to a discussion forum or comment section where
participants directly reply to each other, it discourages unproductive behavior
such as provocations or personal attacks by not presenting statements in
chronological order in combination with voting. Finally, its
comment
routing is intended to provide scalability towards a large number of
participants which generate a potentially large number of statements.
The project was developed and is maintained by
The Computational Democracy
Project, a USA-based non-profit organization which provides a hosted
version and offers related services. It is also released as Open Source
software under the AGPL 3.0 license.
Polis has been used in a
variety of different contexts as part of broader
political processes facilitating broader political participation and
opinion-forming, and gathering feedback and creative input.
Use of Polis in Taiwan
One prominent use case of Polis is its adoption as part of the vTaiwan
participatory governance project. Established by the g0v civic tech community
in the wake of the 2014 mass protests by the Sunflower movement, the vTaiwan
project enables consultations on proposed legislation among a
broad range of stakeholders including government ministries, lawmakers,
experts, interest groups, civil society as well as the broader public.
Although the resulting recommendations are non-binding, they exert pressure on
the government to take action and recommendations have been adopted into
legislation.
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vTaiwan uses Polis for large-scale online deliberations as part of a structured
participation process. These deliberations take place after identifying and involving
stakeholders and experts and providing through information about the topic at
hand to the public. Citizens are then given the opportunity to vote on
statements or provide alternative proposals which allows for the refinement of
ideas and ideally leads to a consensus at the end. The results of these online
deliberations are then curated, discussed in publicly broadcast face-to-face
meetings which ultimately produce concrete policy recommendations. vTaiwan has
in numerous cases given impulses resulting in government action and provided
significant input e.g. on legislation regulating Uber or technological
experiments by Fintech startups.
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See also
-
https://compdemocracy.org/Polis/
-
https://compdemocracy.org/comment-routing/
-
https://info.vtaiwan.tw/
-
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-hackers-polis-consensus-social-media-platform
-
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simple-but-ingenious-system-taiwan-uses-to-crowdsource-its-laws/