Introduction

This methods guide introduces best practices to elevate your use of Polis from a quirky experiment in a sandbox with your friends to a powerful listening aid that whether deployed inside or outside a formal governance process both depicts and produces the public will.

How this guide is organized:

We open with a provocative question, “Is Polis too easy to use?”

Then we walk through some Polis basics: what is it, where has it been successful, what it won’t do.

With this in hand, we lay out how you might assess if Polis is the right fit for your situation.

At core of this guide are four areas of practice — framing, outreach, moderation, and interpreting results. We illustrate each with lessons learned from real world applications.

Broadening scope a bit, we offer an orientation to the contexts swirling around Polis: open source civic technology, artificial intelligence, communication history & theory, peace building, and others.

We include sections on math that explain the assumptions, values, and goals that informed the writing of the algorithm and the way that results are presented in the report.

We continue onto values to discuss what guardrails are needed on data science, the danger of engineering false consensus, and why open source is critical for technology used in formal political processes.

As an appendix, we include links to Methods Guides created by our partners for their contexts and audiences, then finish with a glossary.