HackMDPolis: Open Call Notes
As of 2021-03-11, the Polis open call is no longer running.
Announcement (archived below)
Some previous participants wished to continue meeting, and have started a new group to continue with open calls:
Archived Announcement
From @metasoarous, Polis co-founder & Computation Democracy Project staff:
Hey folks.
I'm posting to let you know we're closing the polis-community chat and open call.
My thanks go out to everyone who has participated in these discussions; Your enthusiasm and excitement for Polis is inspiring, and we deeply appreciate you. Unfortunately, we have realized that our hosting of this space has created confusion about what we do as an organization, and how we do it.
Our mission as a nonprofit is to empower deliberative/participatory democracy through data science. We primarily do this by providing support services to partner organizations. With nonprofit news organizations, we help the public shape an understanding of public opinion. With government agencies, we bring the public's voice directly to power as part of formal decision making processes.
In all cases (whether paid, funded through a grant, or pro-bono), we spend a considerable amount of time
- helping our partners fully understand the tools and methodology
- assisting with best practices in moderation and framing (crafting prompts and seed comments)
- planning for and managing engagement lifecycle
- providing analysis support, including detailed custom reporting
- ensuring ethical and scientific standards (accurate reflection of public's voice, sampling of historically disenfranchised populations/stakeholders, etc.)
We take it as our responsibility to ensure the integrity of every project we work on.
As the chat rooms and community calls have gained momentum (along with service delivery and organizational demands), we have not had the bandwidth to keep up and properly steward these spaces. However, our hosting of them has nevertheless given the impression that the information and activities within are sanctioned by us as an organization, and a part of the services we provide. This has even led people to show up there looking for our support or to collaborate with us. Without us being able to properly moderate, ensure accuracy of information, and generally hold these spaces up to the same standards as our service work, this simply cannot continue.
We do see it as part of our mission/vision to more broadly cultivate connections between developers, data scientists, civil servants, activists and journalists, to foster innovation at the intersection of governance and technology. We will continue to revisit how we achieve this, and have some exciting ideas for the future (more on this soon). For now, we offer you the following:
- you may continue to use the GH Discussions space we recently set up for more open ended discussions about Polis
- GH Issues can of course continue to be used for well defined technical problems or suggestions
- I will be hosting fortnightly developer office hours (alternating between 9am-10am and 4pm-5pm Pacific on Wednesdays; more on this to follow)
- we continue to maintain a chat room for onboarding oss contributors over at https://gitter.im/compdemocracy/polis-dev-chat
- if you are excited by Polis and would like to contribute or collaborate, please reach out to us at hello@compdemocracy.org
We do recognize the potential value of open collaborative spaces, and encourage you all to continue working together. The idea has independently come up of starting a separate discord (or whatever) where folks can discuss/collaborate in relation to deliberative/participatory democracy & technology. We love and welcome this idea, as long as it's clear it's not sanctioned by Polis or The Computational Democracy Project.
Thanks again for your time and energy.
