Polis: In Depth

Deep Dive - Representative Balance

Spoiler alert! No system of democracy is perfect. However, anyone who takes part in an assembly, will mostly say how rewarding they find the experience and some local groups have gone onto holding multiple assemblies. However, sometimes the recording of peoples’ discussions can be difficult with the time constraints of community assemblies, that normally only have a few hours to work through what is a jam-packed process. Sometimes, facilitators and note-takers are fresh volunteers, which can create bias, mistakes and limitations. That together with assemblies not being part of our everyday culture means that despite best efforts, the recommendations or outputs of an informal assembly are not as good as they could be.

The key to people valuing this process is assemblies being as representative and inclusive of all views as possible. UK Assemblies will ensure that inputted statements for voting on in Polis are well-balanced and include as many participants and their views as possible.

The final decision on which statements remain for people to respond to rests with Assembly Organisers and Moderators who have been trained in fair moderation methods.

One of the three pillars of a community assembly is ‘Trust the Process’. We ask of all taking part that they trust Assembly Organisers and Moderators will be offering the best possible experience with their training, knowledge and skills.

Nuts And Bolt Ons

Inclusion, Privacy and Demographic Information Trade Offs

Automatic Curation of Ideas and Like-Minded Folk

Sharing

In summary then, Polis is allows us to bring our collective intelligence to bear, based on shared understanding of issues and enables us to deliberate at scale, in the tradition of nonviolent communication. It isn’t purely a polling tool, it’s more of an interactive ‘suggestion box’ helping us to get consensus around controversial or contentious questions we all face.


Revision #4
Created 11 May 2025 20:51:13 by Ned
Updated 17 June 2025 11:57:43 by Leah - RT Proofreader