The Computational Democracy Pr

The Computational Democracy Project designs, engineers, and maintains Polis, an open source, real-time software system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning. Polis facilitates large, productive online conversations to unlock breakthrough points of consensus on deadlocked political issues. Polis is a powerful platform for collective self-representation, enabling the construction of an interactive model of public opinion landscape. The Computational Democracy Project (CompDem) stewards the AGPL v3 Polis codebase by maintaining stability, security, and delployability; reconciling forks from contibutors (including multiple nation states); and coordinating the roadmap for feature development. In 2022, technical volunteers contributed over 125 hours of advanced coding labor to make Polis better for everyone.

The Computational Democracy Project teaches people to apply data science towards problems of civil engagement and collective decision-making. CompDem provides ongoing education in the form of published How-To content and custom training. CompDem maintains an extensive and growing knowledge base for those implementing Polis, as well as an open data repository and open source Jupyter notebooks for academics and data scientists participating in the development of methods.CompDem supports a network of data scientists, civil servants, and ethicists to operate as a community of practice and convenes advisory boards of professionals in relevant fields and other stakeholders. CompDem interviews facilitators around the world, and in 2022, published the organizations first narratively written case studies on httpscompdemocracyorgcasestudies CompDem has helped improve public discourse for millions of people by inspiring a powerful new system for community handling of misinformation on social media platform X (fka Twitter) in 2022. The night before acquisition, Twitter launched their new Polis-inspired misinformation deliberation system Community Notes (fka Birdwatch) Twitter engineers wrote in their white paper that they built on Polis methodology as a basis for Twitters Community Notes, and publicly stated in WIRED Magazine that their system was inspired by Polis and informed by a year of collaboration with the Polis team. At the same time, CompDem released a paper called Coherent Mode for the Worlds Public Square https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12571 to tell the story of how the system Twitter had purpose-built for handling misinformation on specific tweets through machine learning augmented deliberation which produces coherent outcomes from swarms of users (Polis model) could be broadened to host global deliberation on emerging/trending topics. CompDem undertakes outreach in the form of public speaking and writing. In 2022, Board President Colin Megill spoke at Rage and Reason: Democracy Under the Tyranny of Social Media, hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, at Bard College. CompDem researches and publishes peer reviewed literature in partnership with academics on method, and connection with prior art in analytic political and social science. The Polis method paper (Polis: Scaling Deliberation by Mapping High Dimensional Opinion Spaces) has a citation count of 20.

CompDem hosts the home instance of Polis, providing free use of the tool to the world. Worldwide on www.pol.is, over 250,000 people have participated in deliberative conversations casting over 10 million votes on user-generated statements. CompDem provides support and services to governments, First Nations, civil society organizations, social movements, geographic communities, communities based on membership and/or identity, think tanks, independent media outlets, and academic researchers who are undertaking the building of future democratic systems. CompDems pro bono work focuses on groups who are pursuing self-determination. CompDem supports partners to use Polis ethically, rigorously, and creatively. 2022 saw the first use of Polis integrated with national citizens assembly. The Kilmarat, Austrias National Citizens Assembly on Climate, was a deliberative mini-public of 84 individuals which ran January - July 2022. During the Kilmarat, CompDems facilitation partners used Polis to engage thousands of Austrians on the five climate topic areas under discussion. The Southeast Asia Regional Hub of the United Nations Development Programme undertook a massive three country conversation that grew to include 30,000 youth across Bhutan, Pakistan, and Timor Leste. To reach people across the digital divide, UNDP invested in a fleet of electric tuk-tuks offering free rides to anyone who would converse with the youth facilitator - and occassionally Members of Parliament who took the opportuniy to ride along - and input their point of view into the Polis Conversation. In the Philippines, partners continued training local governmental units, reaching the milestone of over 100 local governmental units. To CompDems understanding, this constitutes the largest Polis training program for civil servants and executive elected officials in the world. The UKs Policy Lab uses Polis in their Collective Intelligence Toolkit, serving other government agencies to improve their policies, and ran ten full national debates with formal registration, one-or two-week debates, with moderation complete analysis. In 2022, United Kingdom followed Taiwains lead to become the second nation state to run Polis as national democratic infrastructure.