Assembly #1 - Post-Assembly Polis Report
Background
On Sunday 27 July, the first XRUK Movement Assembly took place. Around 80 participants took part and a full summary can be found here. In breakout groups, participants were asked to generate ideas that were then added to pol.is, “a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words”.
The thirty-four statements developed in the break-out rooms were then opened up to the whole of the XRUK mailing list and 858 people responded to the statements. Participants were shown all the statements in a semi-random order and could choose to ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’ or ‘Pass’.
Results
The full pol.is results can be found here and are interactive. We invite everyone to take some time to explore them but have summarised the findings below.
Overall, almost all the statements were found to garner consensus (Figure 1), showing that the statements submitted were fairly undivisive. For all statements, ‘Agree’ was the most common response; for only 14 of the 34 statements did fewer than 60% of participants choose ‘Agree’.
Figure 1 Each statement interacted with appears as a single dot. Consensus statements (the majority) appear on the left; divisive statements appear on the right.
There were only two statements that were found to be more divisive, with the first especially divisive and the second still on the consensus side:
- XR should consider identifying individuals within polluting organisations who are destroying their children’s futures (in red in Figure 1).
- Plan actions and campaigns linked to future infectious disease and avoiding harm. Climate breakdown raises the risk of pandemics.
Groups
Polis breaks the respondents down into groups of people who have similar opinions, but diverge in some way from people in other groups. In this analysis, two groups were found:
Group A (525; 61%) - their responses can be summarised as mostly agreeing with the statements; for only four statements did fewer than 50% of Group A agree. They were particularly supportive of ally building and local action and engaging the wider public.
Group B (225; 26%) - their responses can be summarised as mostly disagreeing with the statements; for no statement did 50% or more of Group B agree. They also passed with a much higher frequency than Group A. The statements for which they showed most support tended to relate to XR policy and strategy, but were fairly mixed.
108 people weren’t grouped (13%) - Because of the way that pol.is was used here (as a simple voting tool), these people’s input unfortunately has no effect on the overall results and they have been omitted by the tool.
Despite the differences between these two groups, the top statements were the two most supported statements for Group A and the 3rd and joint 6th most supported statements for Group B. Figure 2 shows the breakdown of these two questions.
Figure 2 The two most popular statements overall, with results for the whole cohort, Group A and Group B.
These were the two statements with the most consensus, whether you just look at the overall majority, or whether you search for maximum consensus between the groups. The most popular statement related to ally building and the second refers to making national issues local; both echo decisions taken in the 2025 strategy, though these results must not be taken as representative of wider opinion.
Figure 3 shows the 3rd to 10th most consensual statements, when taking into account the weighting of each of the groups (if we order solely by majority, the order of these statements changes slightly). There are a wide-range of topics covered in this group of statements but that mainly relate to XR direction and providing actions that can be regularly implemented at a local level.
Figure 3 The 3rd-10th statements that drew the most consensus, when looking to draw consensus between groups.
In terms of future assemblies or pol.is conversations to engage the wider movement in the future of XR, statements 18 and 28, (4th and 5th in the ordering), would make good topics, as they suit the conversational nature of pol.is best practice.
Summary
Overall, there was high consensus on most of the statements, with the vast majority of respondents agreeing with a lot of the statements. This gives a ranking of the most consensual statements, and shows that there are two groups of respondents - one of which agrees with more things and one that is much less in support of the type of statements suggested and more discerning in what they agree with. It’s also interesting to note that three groups were found in the pre-Assembly pol.is poll. This was not reflected here and there didn’t seem to be the same group who were only interested in supporting statements related to internal XR reform.
Considerations
It’s important to remember that not everyone on the XRUK mailing list responded to this pol.is poll. In fact, less than 1% of the current mailing list took part.The cohort is likely to be a more-engaged, active percentage than the average mailing-list member. It is also important to remember that pol.is is not a straightforward preference aggregation tool. In particular, the statements will have been shown in semi-random order, influenced by previous responses, and that no statement received a response from 100% of participants, suggesting many did not get through all 34. This doesn’t mean it’s not valuable, but is something to take into account when interpreting the results.
What happens next?
This is just the start of the process of democratic deliberation that will take place over the coming months. There will also continue to be iteration on the use of the pol.is tool, to make the most of this interesting way of finding consensus. These consensus statements will now be passed to the Operations Circle for deliberation with a concrete proposal to use pol.is for a proper, movement-wide conversation.
How might we use pol.is in the future?
Pol.is is an innovative, interactive tool that allows consensus to be found between groups that apparently display division of opinion. Other projects have found that a common feature of pol.is conversations is that they demonstrate how societies or communities have more uniting them than dividing them; this is rarely acknowledged in political discourse. In 2020, the BBC made a short documentary about how the tool has been used in Taiwan, and it has also been used successfully in countries as diverse as the UK, Uruguay, Bhutan, Timor Leste, New Zealand, cities in the US and Greece, and political parties, among others.
The tool has been most successfully used in the form of an extended conversation, in which participants can rate statements, add their own, and return to rate new statements. The idea is that participants are encouraged to return to the conversation various times to vote on the new statements that have been submitted, and the aim of the ‘game’ is for participants to create statements that bring consensus within the whole cohort - both among those who already share the same opinion and others who can be brought closer to consensus. As patterns emerge of statements likely to create consensus, these will appear first when participants return to vote. For example, if a divisive statement is added, it will not receive consensus and will be ‘downvoted’ and become less visible to participants because we already know it will not achieve consensus, whereas a statement that cuts across groups will ‘rise to the top’.
Planning and delivering such an asynchronous conversation will require significant work, but the rewards in terms of identifying a unifying future direction for XR are significant.
References
Paice, Andy, and Martin Rausch. Creating an Online Conversation between a Nation and a Mini-Public: A Case Study on Polis & the Austrian Citizens’ Climate Council. CII, 2022.
The Computational Democracy Project.