Hi everyone! Co-founder here / AMA.<p>We've been working on this for coming up on 10 years. We launched on HN in August of 2014: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8228974" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8228974</a><p>Brief technical description:
1. produce a matrix of C comments (submitted by participants) * V votes (in 1, 0, -1 form for agree, disagree, pass).
2. Run dimensionality reduction (PCA) and clustering (K-means).
3. Find out which comments best differentiate clusters, show those to everyone <a href="https://compdemocracy.org/representative-comments/" rel="nofollow">https://compdemocracy.org/representative-comments/</a>
4. Identify comments in which the majority of every cluster is voting the same, way, show those to everyone: <a href="https://compdemocracy.org/group-informed-consensus/" rel="nofollow">https://compdemocracy.org/group-informed-consensus/</a><p>For more, we've recently published a paper describing the underlying methods: <a href="https://twitter.com/colinmegill/status/1445044310722822147" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/colinmegill/status/1445044310722822147</a><p>The 501c3 works around the world (USAID, UNDP, cities, countries) to help advance the usage of the method in deliberative democratic settings. Multiple cities (such as Amsterdam) now have their own deployments. We'd love to hear from you! If interested in the project or volunteering, please reach out to: hello@compdemocracy.org
If anyone is interested in a visual walk-through of Polis' emergent dynamics, using a live example discussion from the UK, a few of us fans of the tool created a YouTube video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVJE6GXqzsw&list=PLSL_F7Lwul2dlI9J6-Nzz9_9Pz9AbcG2z&index=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVJE6GXqzsw&list=PLSL_F7Lwul...</a><p>(we'd intended to make more, but life got busy)<p>EDIT: There's an unofficial Polis User Group in a Discord channel. We used to run weekly open calls to help people learn, but for now we just have the Discord. Details: <a href="https://link.g0v.network/pug" rel="nofollow">https://link.g0v.network/pug</a>
I thought this looked really cool, but couldn't find a way to browse existing discussions/polls, so I created one:<p>Topic: ZFS in Mainline<p><a href="https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme" rel="nofollow">https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme</a>
This is really interesting technology for people to find 'common ground' in polarized discussions. I really wish more research would be done in this direction.
In 2018 I was involved with an NGO that planned on using Polis in their work. They contacted the maintainers who recommended contracting an agency which had experience with Polis as many of the core developers worked there. The NGO did just that, and paid a huge sum for the deployment. The first discussion resulted in a total overload of their servers. The NGOs marketing spent for this project was completely wasted and its reputation tarnished. I was brought in in the aftermath to communicate with the Agency and to scale the deployment. They were unable to scale even to 100s of simultaneous users. We tried to deploy it on our own, only to find out, that the public source code on github did not match the one deployed by the agency. The OpenSource Version on GitHub lagged the version the agency deployed by about a year. Some files critical to deployment were completely missing from the public release. Furthermore the Code was a complete mess. Apparently they never had a successful deployment. The fact that 3 years later in this very thread people are still pointing out that it was used years ago in Taiwan (which was the PoC that convinced the execs at my NGO in 2018) is a testament to that.
If you look at their GitHub (which they don’t promote a lot on their website) they explicitly say:
„ If you'd like to set up your own deployment of Polis, we encourage your to reach out to us for support. We look forward to working together“
This is the real purpose of their project, they try to get consulting gigs for themselves and extract a maximum of money out of unsuspecting NGOs and Govermental Orgs. They have sweet talking sales people but are unable to deliver on their promises. Never Again!
So you upvote and downvote comments, which are presented randomly and by themselves. No support for replies or threading? Seems a step backwards to me.
The homepage is <a href="https://pol.is/home" rel="nofollow">https://pol.is/home</a> (shared for tracking purposes, so that we can know the alternatives to Polis).