Polis is a new way to gather open ended feedback from large groups of people. It is well suited to gathering organic, authentic feedback while retaining minority opinions.
Think of the comment field at the end of a survey, or the comment section at the end of a news article. Both allow participants to write down whatever they think.
Humans will need to process the massive amount of text that results. This creates a burden on both survey research teams and comment moderators, respectively. It is also impossible to discern whether a given viewpoint is representative of the majority or not.
Polis overcomes these challenges and produces meaning from open ended responses. Participants can write what they think, but they can also agree and disagree with what others are saying one comment at a time. This process happens in real-time. As soon as someone writes, others can vote.
Polis runs statistical analysis on these voting patterns, also in real-time. It produces opinion groups and surfaces the comments that brought each group together. It also surfaces comments that found broad consensus among participants.
Polis scales to any number of participants, even millions. It accomplishes this by combining crowd behavior and machine learning. Humans can do what they are good at - reading text and forming snap judgments, as well as comparing statements. Computers can do what they are good at - finding patterns in large data sets.