How might a repeating process of Polis conversations work as a testbed?

[patcon]

For the past few years, I've been idly looking for sandboxes in which to run repeating experiments with polis.

Boxes I'm thinking it should check:

1. active existing online community
2. able to host repeating polis conversation (different topics?)
3. values non-partisan discussions (or even "consorting with the enemy")
4. accommodating to outgoing links. (some communities see linking to polis as spam. might require thoughtful diplomacy to not raise scrutiny before it hits its stride)

Ideas

These are things I've considered

Trump's Twitter replies

I thought that maybe posting a link to a polis conversation related to his divisive tweets might be interesting.

• Risk: Twitter is not known to be a place of embracing difference. might be hostile.
• Risk: people might not be in mindset to engage, but rather just to respond and move on
• Risk: easy for the link to be lost in the torrent of replies
• 💡 could choose another divisive account, perhaps with readers from both sides of idealogical divide, chosen since their replies have enough engagement to create buzz, but not enough for the polis link to get lost.
  • Who might these accounts be? Are any communities particular likely to welcome it? (e.g., rationalists? grey pill community? buddhists? others???)

Subreddits

Some sub-reddits really value learning about others, or meeting in the middle:

• /r/AskAConservative
• /r/AskConservatives (smaller, but more interactive, less perma-bans)
• /r/AskALiberal
• /r/ChangeMyView

The /r/AskA... subreddits:

• are intended strictly for hearing from members of specific groups
• are NOT for discussion, but rather for asking questions, and then listening to the answer
• quick responses and gratitude are ok, challenging on answers is not
• /r/AskAConservative auto-moderates any replies/comments with an external link (/r/AskALiberal is likely the same)
  • links in top-level thread-starter messages don't seem to get auto-moderated. moderators may allow posting a polis link in that place for a new thread, assuming the topic asks a question as it's supposed to
• 💡 A shared polis conversation straddling a thread in each subreddit might be neat, each using the same prompt question
  • so the reddit thread would be for discussion, but people from each subreddit could try out polis
  • moderators could pull representative statements from the reddit comments, and drop them into the polis conversation, so wouldn't require community members to actively submit statements in order to be a success -- moderators could do the legwork of ferrying statements from reddit to polis (Related: Should seed comments have identity attached? #775 )

The /r/ChangeMyView subreddit is similar, but has some really unique aspects.

• they value putting forward positions, and ask people to reply and convince them otherwise
• well-intended disagreement is welcome, not just listening
• they value diplomacy and kindness (in order to win "deltas")
• interestingly, they have a bot that watches for people using the "delta" symbol in their comments
  • this means that someone's comment has changed their mind on something. the bot tracks how many minds someone has changes, and treats that as karma or currency in the community (it uses subreddit flair to track/share this)

Why

• iterations. repeating every week or so is a good pace. moderate cycle time for learning and moving on.
• low barrier. running your own first polis convo can seem like a big task. it's tempting to take months to find the perfect opportunity.
• low stakes. it can be stressful to "waste" the opportunity to learn polis with a community you care about. you don't want to give a bad impression. seeing how it works on a looser and more distant community would make it lower stakes to learn and explore.
• learning/onboarding tool. something active for newcomers to jump into and participate in. learning how it shapes conversations can be a bit abstract until you see a conversation running live. this would make it more concrete.
• generate interest. people in community might get curious, since polis is being used to discuss things they care about out in the world.
• can be automated to a degree. not at first, but maybe later.

How does the above sound to others? Any concerns or criticisms? Anyone interested in this sorta of experiment? Any other ideas for how it could be used in places different than the ones above?

Thanks for reading!

[ThenWho]

Thanks @patcon , lots of good stuff to unpack here!

I was thinking about this, and I have used polis as a repeating convo only once with mixed results, as an anonymous complaint box. The idea was that people will go to submit their complaint, but also vote on others' complaints, and gradually important complaints will surface. Rinse and repeat. Worked ok at the beginning but regular interaction is not something you have with a complaint box 🙂, so it's fallen on very low activity levels.

It's a good idea, I think, but it's not clear to me how it can work in practice. Polis convos are indirect social networks; people are connected through statements, but for your mental model you can ignore these if you want. Having an ongoing convo means that (hopefully) the same people will keep coming back, submit/vote on statements, and connect in new ways.

The Polis concept is that there doesn't have to be isolated clusters of people - they interconnect themselves over time with bridge statements - but in this case some clusters will come together over time and some people who where closer together will move apart.

Now, what can you run on this network? Why does it need to reconfigure? Is this a community? Can it be one? What can it do?

Questions, question, questions...

[patcon]

anonymous complaint box

Neat! Thanks for sharing :) Interesting use-case. Thinking on it...

It's a good idea, I think, but it's not clear to me how it can work in practice.

I agree. There needs to be a good incentive for participants to do the work of participating and seeking bridge positions:

• in vTaiwan's polis usage, it's agenda-setting power of livestreamed stakeholder meeting
• in /r/ChangeMyView, it's deltabot point (and flair badges) for changing hearts & minds, or it's upvotes/attention/engagement of others who response to your unpopular or complex views

I'm not sure what the incentive might be here. 💡 Maybe it's being the subject of a short 5-minute podcast format, like an interview or something comparable. Oh! Or maybe a format could be that a randomized bridge person is selected to moderate a conversation between people from the centers of clusters. So the bridge person has mediating authority, but the people in the center of clusters still get heard (and given exposure). And they talk about statements pulled from the conversation, so every participant can kinda "script" the episode (and might hear their name come up).

Now, what can you run on this network? Why does it need to reconfigure? Is this a community?

I hadn't thought of polis conversations as a social network or community, so that's a provoking thought. Though I have clear eyes about how the recognizable faces in the graph have affected my reading of it, in the past. So my social graph def affected how I built a story!

I suppose I mostly don't think of polis conversations as community, just as a wouldn't call a reddit thread "a community", nor would I call a single public consultation process "a community". They all seem like just ephemeral tools that can be a scaffold on which a community can grow or lean on. But maybe a community is particularly supported to form around stewarding a process that uses polis, like vTaiwan does :)

[ThenWho]

Ephemeral tools with returning participants equals community in my book 🙂 . But I see you point, and I think you're up to something there: in my mind polis is 'people-first', in part because that was my first impression based on the available material. That's also why e.g. I told you above to 'ignore the statements'.

But what if we 'ignore the participants'? What if the statements are the important ones, and relationships between them, but not the people that make the connections? A standing or repeating polis convo like that could be about e.g. a political party's priorities on a number of issues. (I know polis is not envolved in parties' actions, but it is deliberative democracy after all.. In any case, think of it as 'any group that wants to take collective action based on standing/consensus principles')

I like the podcast idea 💡, and putting a face to different clusters, and debating things based on positions in a polis convo. I think it could be a powerful tool if we could combine polis with more interactive deliberations like that. We need more of these hybrid approaches!

But I don't believe in it as a motivation tool: people find motivation in any number of personal ways, and studies have shown that offering 'rewards' for work that someone would have done anyway actually reduces their enjoyment of that work.

In this case, I think the strongest motivator, that would make someone come back again and again is one: results.
As long as people can see they participate in something that produces results, and not just discussion-for-discussion's-sake, they'll continue putting the effort.

Results can be promoted in many ways:

• Through facilitation and key moderator actions (AKA "moving things forward" and "making things actionable").
• Follow up actions based on e.g. uncontroversial statements.
• Smoothening the polis workflow (the devs equivalent to 'curling parents' 😄 ), so that results are more visible and effort is minimized.
• Probably a lot more 🙂

[patcon]

Another kinda out-there way to run repeating polis convos in a neat way.

Assuming someone has (1) a building with fob access, and (2) is member of or knows member of a willing governing [condo] board or landlord...

They could rig the lobby with a TV, and install 3 fob scanners at the door. Label each as agree/disagree/pass. Rig screen inside (glass) door to show polis conversation, and a large rotating statement. Teach everyone to respond to the statement while fobbing in with their personally assigned fob. Now, the governing body can extract information/data from residents about issues of concern to the building, without asking for any extra effort beyond just entering the building :) #lazygov

h/t my friend dilini, from riffing on her new condo board position

[ThenWho]

Kind of like the happy/unhappy buttons in airports 🙂 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/02/05/customer-satisfaction-at-the-push-of-a-button

I wouldn't trade off the deliberation part though - that's important. Carefully stating own opinions and reflecting on others' is the differentiating factor with polis. Maybe by running this building feedback system using prev board minutes/discussion points, to be discussed again in the next one..?

[patcon]

I wouldn't trade off the deliberation part though

Totally agree. In the building I know, that exists already, and would be complemented by an entry polling system with perhaps less skew in voices. At this friend's condo, they have a very active Facebook group where that happens, which I believe became more important when hallway conversations fell during covid. But some ppl VERY overrepresent themselves there (due to time, passion, FB-affinity, etc). So what the condo board perceives as the consensus is prone to be biased.

I like the suggestion of aligning purpose and content with issues and comments already on the table for the governing body :)