Polis

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Description

Jess Scully:

" vTaiwan. (The “v” stands for virtual.) A mixed-reality, scaled listening exercise, it was an entirely new way to make decisions. The platform invites citizens into an online space for debate that politicians listen to and take into account when casting their votes. Government would start a new vTaiwan process on a political question it was deliberating, and Taiwanese people from across the full spectrum of opinion would join one another to discuss it online.

Crucially, however, the discussants found themselves in an entirely new kind of online space – exactly the opposite of a social media platform that encourages strife. vTaiwan used a platform called Polis, designed by Seattle-based technologists, that turned the engineering of the tech giants on its head. Like any other social media platform, Polis would let anyone share their feelings on the issue with everyone else, and agree and disagree with the opinions of others. But that’s where the similarity ended.


As the debate began, Polis drew a map showing all the different knots of agreement and dissent as they emerged. As people expressed their views, rather than serving up the comments that were the most divisive, it gave the most visibility to those finding consensus – consensus across not just their own little huddle of ideological fellow-travellers, but the other huddles, too. Divisive statements, trolling, provocation – you simply couldn’t see these.


“People spend far more time discovering their commonalities rather than going down a rabbit hole on a particular issue,” Audrey Tang tells me. “Invariably, within three weeks or four, we always find a shape where most people agree on most of the statements.” They found that re-engineering the online space had exposed a deeper human truth. In politics, humans spend most of their time concentrating on what they disagree upon. But if you gamify consensus, you expose points of unity that were previously hidden.

Soon, vTaiwan was being rolled out on issue after issue, especially those related to technology, and each time a hidden consensus was revealed. Underneath an angry debate about Uber regulation, for instance, it emerged that everyone really just cared about safety. Then there was the extremely angry debate about whether to change Taiwan’s time zone. But what initially had all the hallmarks of geopolitics (closer to China, or further away?) really wasn’t about that at all – everyone wanted Taiwan to maintain its autonomy, they just disagreed on whether a time zone was the way to do it. The participants even began to change the questions themselves – rather than argue over whether drunk drivers should be beaten with canes, everyone began to focus on how to prevent drunk driving in the first place.


Most valuable of all, by clearing away the noise and divisiveness, vTaiwan created outcomes that the government could actually act on. It has formed the core of around a dozen pieces of laws and regulations now implemented in Taiwan, on everything from revenge porn to fintech regulation. More are waiting to be passed." (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-hackers-polis-consensus-social-media-platform?)


Examples

Bowling Green, Kentucky

Jess Scully:

"The Taiwan model may be catching on.

Polis was used to bring 2,000 people together at a virtual town hall in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Asked how to improve the local area, residents found consensus around improving traffic flow, adding bike lanes, beautification of the waterfront, even access to broadband internet services.

The local government of Newham in the UK used it to help inform parking policy. And in Singapore, the government used it to hear from young people about their views on active citizenry, inclusivity, and awareness around mental health.

The system’s potential to heal divisions, to reconnect people to politics, is a solution made for the problems of our age." (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/27/taiwan-civic-hackers-polis-consensus-social-media-platform?)