Polis (or Pol.is) is wiki surveysoftware designed for large group collaborations.[1] An example of a civic technology, Polis allows people to share their opinions and ideas, and its algorithm is intended to elevate ideas that can facilitate better decision-making,[2] especially when there are lots of participants.[3]
Polis has been credited for assisting the passage of legislation in Taiwan.[2][4] Pol.is has also been used in America, Canada, Singapore,[5] Philippines,[6] Spain[7] and other governments around the world.[8]
Pol.is was founded by Colin Megill, Christopher Small, and Michael Bjorkegren after the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring movements.[5]
In Taiwan, pol.is has been "one of the key parts" of vTaiwan's suite of open-source tools for its citizen engagement efforts arising out of the Sunflower Student Movement.[9][2] vTaiwan claims that of the 26 national issues related to technology were discussed on the platform and 80% led to government action.[5][9] Pol.is is also utilized by "Join," a national platform for online deliberation run by the Taiwanese government.[10][11] Megill credits Audrey Tang and CL Kao, a cofounder of g0v, with convincing him to open-source pol.is.[12]
In 2023, Megill advised OpenAI on how to facilitate deliberation at scale in a way that was more efficient that Polis, which still required significant human labor and analysis at the time. He helped to award $1 million in grants to teams working on solving the problem of deliberation at scale.[13]
Reception
Andrew Leonard, The Financial Times, and VentureBeat describe Pol.is as a possible antidote to the divisiveness of traditional internet discourse by gamifying consensus.[12][7][14] Audrey Tang agreed saying, "Polis is quite well known in that it's a kind of social media that instead of polarizing people to drive so called engagement or addiction or attention, it automatically drives bridge making narratives and statements. So only the ideas that speak to both sides or to multiple sides will gain prominence in Polis."[15]
Darshana Narayanan, in an op-ed in the Economist, argues that open-source machine-learning-based tools like Polis can help to bypass the influence of special interests or experts.[17]
Jamie Susskind cited polis and vTaiwan as a model for democracies, particularly around digital policy issues.[18]
^Richman, Josh (2024-02-27). "Podcast Episode: Open Source Beats Authoritarianism". Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved 2024-07-14. Polis is quite well known in that it's a kind of social media that instead of polarizing people to drive so called engagement or addiction or attention, it automatically drives bridge making narratives and statements. So only the ideas that speak to both sides or to multiple sides will gain prominence in Polis. And then the algorithm surfaces to the top so that people understand, oh, despite our seeming differences that were magnified by mainstream and other antisocial media, there are common grounds...
