Polis

In plain language, Polis is a an open source technology for survey research that leverages data science. It is described on the website as:

a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning.

More specifically, Polis is a platform for a conversation, in which participants submit short text statements, or comments, (<140 characters) which are then sent out semi-randomly to other participants to vote on by clicking agree, disagree or pass. Polis allows conversation owners to create conversations which can seamlessly engage (currently) up to hundreds of thousands or (conceivably) millions of participants.

Polis provides automatic (real-time, web-based report) and CompDem, or your own data scientists, can produce manual (python Jupyter notebooks based) data science analysis of the resulting polis opinion matrix available in the data export. See: services.

Polis is a 💡 Wikisurvey, as:

• the dimensions of the survey are created by the participants themselves
• the survey adapts to participation over time and makes good use of people's time by showing comments semi-randomly
• participants do not need to complete the entire survey to contribute meaning

pol.is is the main instance of the technology hosted online, but there are other instances in the wild.

In its highest ambition, Polis is a platform for enabling collective intelligence in human societies and fostering mutual understanding at scale in the tradition of nonviolent communication. Polis is open source software released under the AGPL3 license.