Polis (pol.is) review: open-source AI-assisted civic deliberation platform used by governments worldwide to map public opinion at scale.
Polis is an open-source platform for large-scale public deliberation, originally built in Seattle around 2012 in response to the communication challenges of movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. It was open-sourced under the AGPLv3 license in 2016 and is now maintained by The Computational Democracy Project, a Seattle-based nonprofit formed in 2018.
Rather than collecting free-text comments, Polis structures participation around short statements that other participants vote on, then applies statistical clustering to surface where large groups agree and disagree, producing an interactive map of public opinion.
Participants submit brief statements about a topic and vote to agree, disagree, or pass on statements from other participants, rather than replying directly to one another, which reduces noise and personal conflict typical of open comment threads.
Polis's backend uses real-time statistical and machine-learning analysis to group participants into opinion clusters and identify consensus statements that bridge groups, as well as divisive statements that separate them, all visualized through an interactive report that organizers can share publicly.
Polis is free and open source under the AGPLv3 license, and organizers can run conversations directly on the hosted pol.is site at no cost, or self-host the open-source code from the compdemocracy GitHub repository.
As a nonprofit-maintained project, Polis has no commercial pricing tiers; The Computational Democracy Project sustains development through grants, partnerships, and support services for governments and research institutions rather than subscription revenue.
Polis is an open-source, AI-assisted platform for large-scale public deliberation that lets participants submit and vote on statements, then uses machine learning to map areas of consensus and disagreement.
Yes, Polis is free and open source under the AGPLv3 license, usable directly on pol.is or self-hosted from the public GitHub repository.
Polis was created by Colin Megill, Christopher Small, and Michael Bjorkegren in Seattle around 2012, and is now maintained by the nonprofit Computational Democracy Project.
Polis has been used by governments and civic organizations in the United States, Canada, Singapore, the Philippines, Finland, Spain, and notably Taiwan through its vTaiwan process.
Unlike surveys that collect free-text responses, Polis uses a statement-and-vote structure with machine-learning clustering to surface consensus and divisive opinions at scale, rather than raw response data.
Yes, the Polis codebase is open source under AGPLv3 and available on GitHub for organizations that want to self-host their own instance.
Polis is designed, engineered, and maintained by The Computational Democracy Project, a Seattle-based 501(c)3 nonprofit formed in 2018.
Polis is used for large-scale civic engagement, public consultations, citizens' assemblies, and research projects that need to understand public opinion across large, diverse groups.