Sunday morning social reconstruction.

POLIS, the future of governance?

I’ve been recomending Polis for years now as part of how communities can govern themselves.

What is Polis? It’s form of Wikisurvey, a platform for mass conversations that is consensus orientated. You have a subject and you want the local community to decided which way to go. You start a conversation, everyone joins in, little by little a consensus can emerge that leads on to a policy decision. “Input Crowd, Output Meaning”

The Polis algorythm is open source, anyone can work out how it works and what it does. The algorithm itself is designed to bring consensus to the forefront. Both of these are the opposite to how things work on all the other major online social media platforms.

vTaiwan has been using it for years as have some town councils around the world. More recently so has Grimsby “In the coming weeks, people of Grimsby have the opportunity to take part in a mass online conversation, as well as events including history walks, writing workshops and a prioritisation event which will help to develop a collective vision for our town.” Brilliant! Excellent! Well done Grimsby and whoever came up with the idea.

This Polis way of reaching decisions is remarkably different to how we tend to do it today. Even the more ‘radical’ approaches that move away from simple majorities tend all to involve people voting at some point.

Polis, as I see it, is a way of moving beyond the normal voting processes. Instead of this the conversation and the algorithm work together to gently bring things to a consensus point. I participate with the conversation, perhaps I test propositions through argument (the algorithm and the mediators tend to send Trolls and disrupters into the background, again the opposite of the main social medias). We can have a mature debate and at some point I decide that I’m fine with the consensus proposition that starts emerging. When most of the others who are involved in the conversation do the same we have a result. No screaming, shouting, fighting and rage, just a dignified conversation that brings people together.

Polis is one of the main tools that have been developed to help us bring down the anti-social paradigm behind today’s violent, stupid, unjust human world. It’s one of the tools of our Prosocial future. Instead of blindly following incompetent leaders. Instead of hoping again and again that some superhero is going to pull our nuts out the fire. Instead of giving away our power to corrupt elites we prosocialise it all, take back the power to decide and then make consensus based decisions.

Have a look around the world and how we run our affairs, take a look in a school playground and you’ll see the exact same thing. It is long past the time to put into place post-playground governance systems that are just, equitable, inclusive and consensus based.

It’s time to accept that we all have opinions and that mine has as much value as anyone elses’s. It’s time for me to accept that other people have other points of view and that this DOESN’T mean that they are my adversaries or enemies. It means that I have the opportunity to try and understand the other points of view. It’s an opportunity for me to refine my point of view, to see it’s flaws, strong points and to understand that I’m not necessarily always right. This is a positive process and as we’re no longer in the ‘playground’ I can accept it, welcome it and participate with the conversation as someone who has at least the beginings of wisdom, and so for all the others.