[HN Gopher] Polis - Large Scale Discussions
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Polis - Large Scale Discussions
Author : manx
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-11-27 14:48 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (compdemocracy.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (compdemocracy.org)
| patcon wrote:
| If anyone is interested in a visual walk-through of Polis'
| emergent dynamics, using a live example discussion from the UK, a
| few of us fans of the tool created a YouTube video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVJE6GXqzsw&list=PLSL_F7Lwul...
|
| (we'd intended to make more, but life got busy)
|
| EDIT: There's an unofficial Polis User Group in a Discord
| channel. We used to run weekly open calls to help people learn,
| but for now we just have the Discord. Details:
| https://link.g0v.network/pug
| BeefySwain wrote:
| I thought this looked really cool, but couldn't find a way to
| browse existing discussions/polls, so I created one:
|
| Topic: ZFS in Mainline
|
| https://pol.is/3h8kkbfdme
| manx wrote:
| Here is a big one from Taiwan:
| https://polis.pdis.nat.gov.tw/report/r77xrzjr7nnf6872eiddp/
|
| And an interesting article about how they're using it:
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi...
| colinmegill wrote:
| This is a solid article and entry point.
|
| A chapter of Carl Miller's Death of the Gods is one of the
| better narrative deep dives: https://www.amazon.com/Death-
| Gods-Global-Power-Grab/dp/17851...
|
| As well as Chris Horton's piece in MIT Tech Review:
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-
| simpl...
| rytor718 wrote:
| Yeah this should be linked in the top comment because I
| couldn't really grasp what Polis was even for by going to the
| link on this topic. This article really does a great job of
| clearing up its purpose and benefits. Thanks a lot for
| linking this!
| Rygian wrote:
| Really confused as to why that page tries to load javascript
| from facebook.net
| colinmegill wrote:
| Old login code, I'm assuming, but it's OSS if you want to
| check.
| humanistbot wrote:
| So you upvote and downvote comments, which are presented randomly
| and by themselves. No support for replies or threading? Seems a
| step backwards to me.
| wffurr wrote:
| The lack of replies is a feature, not a bug. Polis is about
| generating consensus from what I'm reading about it, not about
| maximizing engagement ala Twitter, FB, et al.
|
| From the Polis FAQ: https://compdemocracy.org/faq/
|
| "Structured replies also eliminate the possibility of trolling
| by replying directly (and thus provoking further response)."
|
| This Wired article has more:
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/taiwan-democracy-social-medi...
|
| "Using the Internet to pull people together rather than split
| them apart requires designing an environment very different
| from the usual online forums for political debate, such as
| Twitter or Facebook."
|
| "Polis has reengineered many of the features we take for
| granted on social media. No reply button - hence no trolling.
| No echo-chambers, replaced by an attitudes map showing you
| where you are in relation to everyone else. The platform does
| not highlight the most divisive statements, but gives more
| visibility to the most consensual ones."
| colinmegill wrote:
| Correct. For smaller discussions in the 10s, or potentially
| 100s of participants, the limitations of randomness and no
| direct replies are unnecessary. They become useful assumptions
| given thousands and tens of thousands of participants.
|
| The comments are sent out semi-randomly:
| https://compdemocracy.org/comment-routing/
| bijant wrote:
| In 2018 I was involved with an NGO that planned on using Polis in
| their work. They contacted the maintainers who recommended
| contracting an agency which had experience with Polis as many of
| the core developers worked there. The NGO did just that, and paid
| a huge sum for the deployment. The first discussion resulted in a
| total overload of their servers. The NGOs marketing spent for
| this project was completely wasted and its reputation tarnished.
| I was brought in in the aftermath to communicate with the Agency
| and to scale the deployment. They were unable to scale even to
| 100s of simultaneous users. We tried to deploy it on our own,
| only to find out, that the public source code on github did not
| match the one deployed by the agency. The OpenSource Version on
| GitHub lagged the version the agency deployed by about a year.
| Some files critical to deployment were completely missing from
| the public release. Furthermore the Code was a complete mess.
| Apparently they never had a successful deployment. The fact that
| 3 years later in this very thread people are still pointing out
| that it was used years ago in Taiwan (which was the PoC that
| convinced the execs at my NGO in 2018) is a testament to that. If
| you look at their GitHub (which they don't promote a lot on their
| website) they explicitly say: ,, If you'd like to set up your own
| deployment of Polis, we encourage your to reach out to us for
| support. We look forward to working together" This is the real
| purpose of their project, they try to get consulting gigs for
| themselves and extract a maximum of money out of unsuspecting
| NGOs and Govermental Orgs. They have sweet talking sales people
| but are unable to deliver on their promises. Never Again!
| colinmegill wrote:
| Feel free to DM me on twitter if you care to elaborate and want
| to discuss, this is strange and I'm not sure what you're
| referring to. The reason we're a registered 501c3 is that the
| overwhelming majority of the consulting services we provide
| around the world are done pro bono or at a loss. I'm not sure
| what provider you're referring to.
| bijant wrote:
| The question is why your consulting services are necessary in
| the first place. Most Open Source Projects I know can be set
| up by anyone who is competent in the underlying technology.
| You explicitly warn people that they will be unable to set it
| up on their own and that they will need your services. You
| had years to simplify deployment and haven't done so. Your
| Github is still lagging the version that you're privately
| deploying. Can You point to logs of any recent deployment
| that scaled to 100s or 1000s of simultaneous users ?
| Somewhere else in this thread you claim that OSS software has
| a competitive advantage in the EU. Is this the reason you
| pretend that your software is OSS while in practice it is not
| ?
| colinmegill wrote:
| The software is entirely open source and multiple
| independent instances exist. Our main deployment at pol.is
| runs off the same docker containers available to the
| community.
|
| While some time ago, here's an instance that scaled to
| 30,000+ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yh2yKHUKU8
| bijant wrote:
| Wow, this is beyond ridiculous. This is the NGO I was
| involved with. It did not scale to 30,000 it failed
| miserably at merely dozens of simultaneous Users. The
| linked Video is the Exec who took responsibility for
| ordering Polis trying his best at PR Crisis Management.
| He was fired shortly afterwards. Apparently You don't
| understand German, because in the video he is admitting
| the technical problems with polis. I'm just amazed how
| anyone would point to that video, to tout the supposed
| strengths of their platform.
| colinmegill wrote:
| Interesting! This instance had thousands of concurrent
| users for a total of 33,000+ and was one of the larger
| instances of usage of the tech. There was no independent
| deployment of the technology in this case, so, that is
| inaccurate.
| bijant wrote:
| The instance failed at mere DOZENS of simultaneous users.
| Clients kept retrying and then there were thousands of
| requests of users who were unable to interact with the
| instance. I went though the logs in detail. It was a
| clusterfuck.
| rocauc wrote:
| you know, Jared Polis would likely appreciate this.
| colinmegill wrote:
| He did not.
| namlem wrote:
| Did he not like the name?
| eterps wrote:
| This is really interesting technology for people to find 'common
| ground' in polarized discussions. I really wish more research
| would be done in this direction.
| colinmegill wrote:
| Hi everyone! Co-founder here / AMA.
|
| We've been working on this for coming up on 10 years. We launched
| on HN in August of 2014:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8228974
|
| Brief technical description: 1. produce a matrix of C comments
| (submitted by participants) * V votes (in 1, 0, -1 form for
| agree, disagree, pass). 2. Run dimensionality reduction (PCA) and
| clustering (K-means). 3. Find out which comments best
| differentiate clusters, show those to everyone
| https://compdemocracy.org/representative-comments/ 4. Identify
| comments in which the majority of every cluster is voting the
| same, way, show those to everyone:
| https://compdemocracy.org/group-informed-consensus/
|
| For more, we've recently published a paper describing the
| underlying methods:
| https://twitter.com/colinmegill/status/1445044310722822147
|
| The 501c3 works around the world (USAID, UNDP, cities, countries)
| to help advance the usage of the method in deliberative
| democratic settings. Multiple cities (such as Amsterdam) now have
| their own deployments. We'd love to hear from you! If interested
| in the project or volunteering, please reach out to:
| hello@compdemocracy.org
| kodah wrote:
| Does agree/disagree/pass really reflect what people think even
| in short form? A lot of voting may occur on a particularly
| emotional point, even though a voter may disagree with the rest
| of a statement. I've seen this on Reddit and here, and it's
| always made me wonder how we can actually capture the net of
| people's sentiments accurately.
| colinmegill wrote:
| Great question. You can see raw data from a conversation on
| biodiversity that took place in New Zealand in partnership
| with the Ministry of Conservation and hosted by an
| independent news organization here:
|
| https://github.com/compdemocracy/openData/tree/master/scoop-.
| ..
|
| If you take a look at the comments file, you can judge
| whether the system has been successful at getting people to
| submit a single idea at a time for people to agree and
| disagree on. My assessment is: mostly yes, sometimes there
| are still multiple ideas in 140 characters.
|
| The system encourages the decomposition of ideas, so that we
| can identify which factors may be ignorable and which are
| significant to our purposes
| (consensus/disagreement/differentation).
| patcon wrote:
| This is a great question. I've been using Polis for maybe 5
| years.
|
| The "pass" is a catch-all for many things[1], including
| "rejecting a premise". It's non-obvious in the current
| interface, but there's room for coaching/learning how to
| engage with "complex/mixed" statements. For example,
| statements you encounter that conflict with your own
| emotional or factual sensibilities, which you're reluctant to
| respond to in a simple way (with agree/disagree). In this
| case, users can just "pass" on that statement, and
| immediately go below and submit a new "corrected" statement,
| or alternatively divide that one statement into a few
| separate ones, that can be reacted to more authentically.
|
| That way, you're not forced to weigh in on things you find to
| be leading statements or overly simplistic. And the pool of
| statements for everyone becomes ever-more-nuanced through
| these sorts of interactions, and the map of the sentimental
| landscape becomes more high-resolution :)
|
| [1]: https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis/discussions/774
| DLA wrote:
| Why is it so hard to find the code? Links to open source and
| the license.
| wffurr wrote:
| It's straight from the Welcome page under "community":
| https://compdemocracy.org/Welcome
|
| https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis
|
| GNU AGPL 3:
| https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis/blob/dev/LICENSE
|
| There's a doc on embedding it on a site, too, if that's the
| end you're interested in:
| https://compdemocracy.org/embedding-polis-on-your-web-
| proper...
| wffurr wrote:
| This is fascinating stuff and seems like a leverage point to
| apply technology to actually solve some of the big problems
| facing humanity, which at their core are political problems,
| not necessarily technological ones.
|
| Where do you need help the most with this project?
|
| Where do you see it going from here?
|
| Any interesting big trials or deployments in the works?
| colinmegill wrote:
| Thanks, and great questions!
|
| 1. Where can I help?
|
| We have a range of volunteer opportunities for frontend and
| backend engineers (React/legacy Backbone.JS/D3), as well as
| data scientists (python / clojure). We also have a range of
| opportunities to work with organizations around the world
| that need but don't have the data science background
| necessary to properly implement the tool. There's manual work
| to do here that usually means getting on video with people in
| different time zones.
|
| We have some refactoring needs that are still in flight as we
| are still in a long transition from startup codebase to 'easy
| to deploy' generalized OSS repo.
|
| 2. Where is this going?
|
| We're excited to see people deploying this around the world,
| (a process that has been eased by community volunteers along
| with investment from governments). Because of Schrems II, OSS
| platforms have a degree of competitive advantage in Europe as
| those governments that need to own their own data, and there
| are also big pushes for deliberative democracy there.
|
| https://twitter.com/ICesnulaityte/status/1463426562783694857
| https://participedia.net/ https://netdem.nl/en/projects/pol-
| is-in-nederland/
|
| While we've worked around the world, bringing the methods /
| deliberative democracy to the United States is still
| something we're working out. The 501c3 is presently pursuing
| a strategy to 'compile' online deliberations to ballot
| propositions in places with small amounts of signatures
| needed, with the idea that if we take a known issue area (say
| opioids) + population sample + emergent discussion we'll
| discover a solution space, as the tech has elsewhere (like
| Taiwan), that won't then kick off the kind of adversarial
| advertising campaigns referendums usually attract.
| Potentially multiple zeros cheaper, and hopefully better
| outcomes. We're presently working on our first of these.
| Follow https://twitter.com/compdem for updates.
|
| My writing about the future of democracy (working on a book)
| is presently focused on whether or not we can replace
| political parties in practice and compile a better high
| dimensional space to a legislature of independents. https://w
| eb.archive.org/web/20190629035125/https://civichall...
|
| 3. Any big deployments?
|
| UNDP has just concluded what they think may have been the
| largest _online_ deliberative exercises in the developing
| world in history, in Bhutan, Pakistan, and East Timor. The
| full report will eventually be posted to
| https://twitter.com/compdem
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(page generated 2021-11-27 23:01 UTC)