Closing Commenting Early

• Closing commenting early helps to manage sparsity in the sparse matrix which is the polis opinion matrix
• Sparsity simply means participants that did not vote on comments
• Comments submitted right before the end of the conversation might only have a few votes before the conversation is closed. Sparsity would be high in this case.
• Comments submitted at the beginning of the conversation would have an opportunity to be voted on by everyone, and would have lower sparsity.
• Consider a conversation open for two weeks:
  • Conversation A is open. Comments are submitted up to the last minute, and have very few votes.
  • Conversation B closes commenting after one week via conversation configuration. All participants are asked to return now that the full set of comments is in the system. Votes accumulate on the comments already in the system.