2019-09-18 Polis - Discuss with people directly and smartly

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.