Polis
Discuss with people directly and smartly Romulus Tsai (PDIS.tw)
AIT@40 Digital Dialogues • https://www.ait.org.tw/ait-at40/digital-dialogues/ • American Institute in Taiwan opens four dialogues to celebrate 40 years since the signing of the Taiwan Relations Act. • People at AIT are committed to listening carefully to all of suggestions, using many tools like polis.
BEYOND FLATLAND (1/5) • Written by Colin Megill, the author of polis. • In many places, democracy is “Choose A or B, no any other things”. • 42% of “independents” Americans’ voices are excluded from the policy formation process at every step. • In Brexit referendum, thousands of issues are wrapped as a binary vote – “Leave” or “Remain”.
BEYOND FLATLAND (2/5) • Obama had 300 volunteers and a handful of dedicated staff to pick 10 letters from 10,000 letters per day from the public to him. • But in a recent case, only a single Federal employee is tasked with reviewing the million plain-text comments. • There are better ways to represent citizens using machine learning.
BEYOND FLATLAND (3/5) • Colin was in Italy 2016. A referendum was held to decide the fate of the powers of the Italian executive branch. • The president threatened to resign if he lost his bid to centralize powers, so his political rivals opposites the referendum, nobody cares the issue itself. • Colin and other attendees simulated the referendum, and found “Referendums shouldn’t be used as a replacement of election.”
BEYOND FLATLAND (4/5) • Polis was designed to collect and analyze opinions. • In Taiwan, polis served as an input to facilitate rulemaking in the process of regulating Uber. • It is NOT “Uber or No Uber”, but to decide how much Uber should be as the same as Taxi. • Uber should pay tax, the driver should have license, and it must have insure. • Uber don’t need to paint cards to yellow as regular taxies, and taxies should accept digital reservation and payment.
BEYOND FLATLAND (5/5) • Democratic institutions can do better with public wisdom and experiences. • People know their voices are heard. It can engage the population early and involve them in agenda setting. • People can see their comments discussed and voted. • Polarized deadlocks should be avoided. We keep designing to break the back of faction.
How does it work (1/4) • A conversation is a web page, with many comments (and auto translated). • Everyone comes to vote agree or disagree.
How does it work (2/4) • People are grouped by their votes. • People have similar opinions in their group.
How does it work (3/4) • In the report page, you can see comments are consensus or divisive. • This is a consensus one.
How does it work (4/4) • This is a divisive one. • Consensus comments may have higher priority since most people agree on it.
What PDIS did for polis • Original pol.is is hosted by the developer team, bound with Heroku and Amazon S3. • PDIS’ modified the source code, so we can run polis instance on our own server. • E.g. A computer in the office, or virtual machine on any cloud service we like. • Full control and access to all data collected.
How to start to use polis • Mountain climbing regulation discussion: • https://join.gov.tw/policies/detail/631ec3e 3-3880-44d4-a9fb-306316b5a4f2 • Our government chose five orientations about this issue, then open a polis conversation for each orientation. • Each conversation has a responsible Department, they will apply several seed comments. • Then we promote this discussion on traditional and Internet medias, Facebook, etc.
Conclusion • Polis is a tool to push democracy beyond choosing which party. • Public people can participate policy making in very early stage. • No fixed options, anyone can add comments. • Deep analysis reports, help the organizer to decide priority on each opinion.