Pol.is
The wiki-survey that maps a group's actual opinion landscape: everyone writes short statements and votes on each other's; clustering surfaces what bridges the camps. Famous from vTaiwan, sized for a street.
Pol.is asks participants to do two tiny things: write short statements about the question at hand, and vote agree / disagree / pass on everyone else's. Statistical clustering then reveals the real opinion groups — and, crucially, surfaces the statements that *bridge* them. No replies, no threads, no dunking; the interface simply has no button for a flame war.
Its famous outing was vTaiwan's 2015–16 Uber deliberation, where a few hundred citizens converged on near-unanimous recommendations that became regulation. But the more shelf-relevant story is Bowling Green, Kentucky: in 2018 the local civic assembly ran Pol.is with the daily newspaper, drew 2,000+ residents casting 225,000 votes, and found a town that agreed with itself about traffic and accountability far more than its Facebook comments suggested; a 2025 follow-up engaged roughly a tenth of the city.
Maintained by the Computational Democracy Project (a US nonprofit), AGPL-3.0, free hosted conversations at pol.is, fully self-hostable.
Neighborhood remix: a forty-person Polis for one street — 'what should happen to the empty lot?' — QR code taped to the lot's fence, results read aloud at the block party. The bridging statements become the agenda.
Details
- maker: Computational Democracy Project (US 501c3)
- hosted: free hosted conversations; self-hostable
- license: AGPL-3.0 (with additional permission)
- repo url: https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis
- image url: https://texakzqqenzpxawktbgx.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/studio-library/tool-screenshots/polis-2026-08.jpg
- remix idea: A one-street Polis about one shared question, with results read aloud in person.
- practice kind: tool
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Contributed by The Computational Democracy Project (Colin Megill et al.) · compdemocracy.org
Original source: https://compdemocracy.org/polis/
See something to fix or add? Suggest an edit on GitHub — the commons lives in git too, and its history is the changelog.
local-civic-techcivic-tech-tooldeliberationopen-source