Guide: Polis for Participants

Why Are We Using Polis?

How do we create a democracy capable of responding to the poly-crises we see in the world today? Polis is an interactive polling tool. It has been used extensively around the world to help with deliberative and democratic decision making. It’s increasingly being recognised as a valuable add-on to reduce bias in deliberations.

Using Polis can strengthen community assembly processes 'by harvesting the wisdom of the crowd', in other words, by helping us better understand what large groups of people think. Polis can automatically sort the crowd’s preferences or priorities. It produces reports statistically as well as meaningfully, which also allows for transparency of the process.

How to Participate

• Participants get a link which gives access to a poll on Polis.
• You are offered a range of statements to vote on anonymously. You can either: ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’, or say ‘Pass’ / ‘Unsure’.
• If you think a statement is missing, you have the opportunity to add your own statements [max 140 characters] for everyone else to vote on. See Guide: How to Write a Great Statement for Polis
• Statements may include demographic questions, e.g. age, gender, etc. Your responses to these types of questions help identify which groups vote in which ways and this helps with fairer decision-making. Polis indicates if one group feels more strongly than another group about a specific issue.
• Polis collects your anonymous responses and then analyses the results.
• The results are then downloaded as reports and then shared on the Rebel Toolkit.

How Polis Respects Your Privacy

• There is no registration process
• It is anonymous
• Your computer has its own address - known as the IP address; this information is deleted from our XR servers after 14 days. We have to keep that information for this short time in order to protect us all from bad agents.
• If there are too few participants, demographic questions could identify you. These will be deleted if there is any risk of breaking anonymity. Demographic questions include age, gender, location, etc.

Moderation

There are trained dedicated Moderators for every Polis poll.

• Sometimes participants add statements that have two options, in which case Moderators will reword this into two statements.
• There will be repetition, Moderators will reject statements that are very similar.
• To view rejected statements and reasons why they've been rejected by Moderators, join the Polis Support broadcast [Telegram]

If you have any questions or need support - contact the UK Assemblies Team