Polis 2.0: The Open-Source Platform Scaling Deliberative Democracy to Millions

Since its launch in 2012, Polis has quietly become one of the most successful experiments in digital democracy. The open-source platform has facilitated over ten million participants across tens of thousands of conversations worldwide, from Taiwan's Uber regulation debates to the UN's largest online deliberative exercises engaging 30,000 youth across Bhutan, East Timor, and Pakistan. Now, The Computational Democracy Project (CompDem) is unveiling Polis 2.0, a quantum leap in scale and capability that promises to make large-scale democratic deliberation accessible to anyone, anywhere.

From Local Experiments to National Infrastructure

The original Polis platform has already proven its worth at the highest levels of government. Taiwan has integrated it into national democratic infrastructure, using it to craft legislation on everything from revenge porn laws to online liquor sales. The UK has employed it for national security consultations, while Finland's wellbeing services counties use it to design programs for elderly safety and children's mental health services based on citizen input. At the local level, cities like Amsterdam and Bowling Green, Kentucky have used Polis to improve residents' lives.

What makes Polis different from typical online forums or social media platforms is its fundamental design philosophy. Instead of encouraging endless debate and polarization, Polis reveals points of consensus even on seemingly deadlocked issues. By collecting and analyzing viewpoints from thousands of participants, it maps where people actually agree, often finding common ground that traditional political processes miss.

The Technical Leap: Scaling to Millions

Polis 2.0 represents a fundamental reimagining of what's possible in digital democracy. The platform's four key innovations work together to create a system that can handle conversations with millions of simultaneous participants while maintaining meaningful analysis.

Scalable Cloud Infrastructure forms the foundation. While Polis 1.0's largest deployment reached 33,547 participants, Polis 2.0's distributed system can handle 10-30x increases, supporting millions of simultaneous users. This isn't just about handling more traffic—it's about maintaining real-time responsiveness as conversations grow exponentially.

Dynamic Opinion Mapping has evolved from simple statistical algorithms to more refined approaches that update in real-time as conversations evolve. The system groups participants based on how similarly they vote and what statements they submit, maintaining clear analysis even across hundreds of thousands of statements and millions of votes.

Semantic Topic Clustering introduces a breakthrough capability: Polis 2.0 is the first platform to use the Embedding Vector Oriented Clustering (EVōC) library from the Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing. This automatically organizes conversations into evolving topic hierarchies—hundreds of topics and subtopics—drawn from both organizer-seeded comments and participant input. Participants can view all topic areas and select those of greatest interest before entering the discussion, allowing the collective to shape the agenda over time.

End-to-End Automation removes the expert facilitator bottleneck that limited Polis 1.0's scalability. Earlier conversations required intensive moderation of participant input and facilitator expertise to distill dense outputs into actionable reports—processes that demanded extensive training and practice. Polis 2.0 automates conversation seeding, moderation (including toxicity filtering), semantic clustering, and report generation while preserving the option for human oversight.

How It Actually Works

Setting up a Polis 2.0 conversation is remarkably flexible. The platform accepts multiple input types optimized for different scenarios. Short statements (1-3 sentences) work best for mobile voting and are typically generated directly by participants. For more complex inputs, Polis 2.0 can pre-process various formats using LLMs:

• Long narratives, chunked into votable statements
• Workshop transcripts converted to votable statements
• Social media posts processed and de-duplicated
• Email submissions from non-digital participants
• Voice recordings transcribed and processed into text

Participant invitation and management has also been revolutionized. The Invite Trees system tracks how participants join conversations, enabling organic growth through networks while maintaining quality. This snowball sampling approach allows organizers to understand how conversations spread and optimize for meaningful participation over viral reach.

Identity management is robust, with advanced XID (external identifier) whitelist and download capabilities plus OIDC authentication providers. The platform also offers complete data portability with XID support, enabling cross-platform participant tracking and analysis compatible with popular polling and survey platforms like SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Typeform, and Google Forms.

Participation and Moderation at Scale

On Polis 2.0, participants can select topics of interest—collectively setting the agenda for what everyone will vote on. They can vote on others' statements (agree, disagree, or pass), submit statements about issues that matter to them, and mark which statements are especially important. Notably, there's no reply function, by design—this prevents the endless threading and polarization common on social media.

Multi-lingual capabilities are built-in and sophisticated. The system detects a participant's browser language and automatically translates UI text and statements into their preferred language. Participants can submit statements in any language and view all statements both in the default language and in their chosen language.

Moderation at scale requires AI assistance, and Polis 2.0 includes several key features:

• Toxicity Detection: Real-time flagging of hate speech, harassment, and extremist content
• Language Processing: Automatic translation for multilingual participation
• Human Oversight: Review of AI moderation decisions, cultural sensitivity for marginalized communities, expert fact-checking, and transparent moderation guidelines co-developed with participant input

The statement routing system itself functions as a form of moderation by determining the optimal presentation of statements to each participant, ensuring exposure to diverse viewpoints while maintaining relevance.

Real-Time Analysis and Actionable Insights

The analysis capabilities of Polis 2.0 are perhaps its most powerful feature. The platform generates comprehensive topic and opinion mapping, identifying popular topics, subtopics and their interconnections, areas of consensus, and points of disagreement.

For each topic and subtopic, Polis 2.0 generates consensus statements that reflect agreement across all groups, supported by the underlying comments and votes. These aren't imposed compromises but authentic consensus statements that emerge from the data.

Automated narrative report generation draws on multiple LLM models to create reports covering the entire conversation or focusing on specific topics and subtopics. The platform employs statistical grounding, prompt engineering, and evaluations to ensure high-quality summaries, with each clause in the report including citations for easy human verification.

All data remains accessible in a repository for ongoing reference and further analysis, ensuring transparency and enabling continued research and policy development.

The Future of Democratic Deliberation

Polis 2.0 represents more than just a technical upgrade—it's a fundamental shift in how we can approach collective decision-making. By combining massive participation capacity with sophisticated analysis and automation, it removes many of the barriers that have limited digital democracy to small-scale experiments.

The platform's success in Taiwan, where it's become part of national democratic infrastructure, suggests that this isn't just theoretical potential. When citizens can participate meaningfully in policy discussions at scale, with their voices properly analyzed and synthesized, the results can be concrete legislative outcomes on complex issues.

As governments worldwide grapple with declining trust in institutions and increasing polarization, tools like Polis 2.0 offer a path forward. They don't replace traditional democratic processes but enhance them, creating new channels for citizen input that can inform and improve decision-making.

The question isn't whether platforms like Polis 2.0 will transform democracy—it's how quickly and effectively we'll adopt them. With its open-source foundation, cloud scalability, and proven track record, Polis 2.0 is positioned to become the standard for digital democratic deliberation in the coming years.

Learn more about Polis 2.0 and how to bring it to your community, organization, or government.