(TL;DR)
Our strategy uses Polis to transform community dialogue into community problem-solving with real world application by targeting accessible participation and procedural justice (voice, power, accessibility, consensus, transparency).
Group coordination
Coordinating groups of people is the critical first barrier to empowering communities. In today’s world, it’s incredibly hard to get even a small group together in one place. That’s before getting to the next step of constructive communication! This severely limits what communities are able to accomplish.
This tool dramatically increases the number of people who can participate. Polis enables everyone on Maui to contribute whenever and wherever they are able. As long as you have access to a device, you can participate.
Procedural justice
The following are targeted to make a process guided by justice, resulting in higher endorsement of the end-result.
Voice
Polis ensures every participant has equal opportunity to contribute statements and vote on others’ opinions, with the platform’s design preventing any single voice from dominating the conversation. Polis treats all votes equally regardless of who casts them. That means no matter how you feel in the world, your voice and vote get equal power here.
Power
- Group power
- By focusing on finding common ground rather than majority rule, it reduces the ability of any group to dominate the outcome.
- Agenda setting
- True power means communities set their own agendas. Rather than merely responding to questions determined by a small body that otherwise controls conversations (like traditional surveys or town halls), Polis allows participants to author their own statements that other participants respond to. This fundamentally redistributes power, creating peer-to-peer deliberation where the community collectively shapes the agenda and surfaces priorities from the ground up.
Accessibility
Designed to empower, Polis’s simple user experience lowers the barrier to participation compared to traditional meetings or lengthy surveys, involving just 2 simple actions from users, which can be done anytime, anywhere:
- Write your own statement
- Vote on others statements (agree/disagree/pass)
Consensus
Polis automatically surfaces statements that have broad agreement across otherwise-divided groups, doing the crucial work of highlighting areas of consensus that may never be found in status quo processes.
Transparency
The platform provides real-time visualization of opinion groups and voting patterns, making the deliberative process visible to all participants and showing exactly where consensus and division exist.
Community conversations create a clear, documented record of public priorities, that everyone has access to.