For the past six years, our team has been working on an OSS tool for citizen engagement called Polis, now in use by governments and political parties around the world. Through case studies and a brief introduction to the kinds of problems in governance which may prove to be amenable to machine learning, we’ll consider possible near and far future democratic systems inspired by advances in computing.

1. AI + THE POLITICAL
PARTY
COLIN MEGILL, POLIS
Web à Québec, April 2019
@colinmegill

2. LOTS OF PEOPLE
LOTS OF ISSUES
LOTS OF INTERESTS
LOTS OF POSITIONS

3. IN ONE
DIMENSION

4. IN TWO
DIMENSIONS

5. WE BUNDLE ISSUES
TO MAKE POLITICS
SIMPLE

9. COMPRESSION

11. “Netflix used to recommend content based on the
region that its users were in, following the general
school of thinking that subscribers in South
America probably would prefer different fare than
subscribers in Canada. But upon looking closer at
the data, the company realized that this wasn’t
actually true, said Netflix VP of Product Todd Yellin.
“We find that to be greater and greater nonsense,
and we are disproving it every day.”

12. “Instead, Netflix is now dividing up its subscriber
base into 1,300 taste communities, which are
solely based on past viewing behavior. Each and
every user can belong to multiple such
communities, and all of these communities spread
across the globe. ... “A big part of personalization
is finding taste communities globally.”

14. TASTE CLUSTER 290

15. SUB GENRE 10118

17. polis is an open source
platform
for efficiently gathering &
making meaning of voices at
scale
using machine learning

18. OCCUPY

19. TURINTURIN, ITALY

20. I don’t like Renzi.

22. what everyone has to say
x
what everyone thinks about it

23. REAL QUICK ML

24. SUPERVISED

25. SUPERVISED

26. REINFORCEMENT

27. UNSUPERVISED

28. UNSUPERVISED

29. CLUSTER BY
SIMILARITY

30. polis is a method

37. “Referendum should not
be used as an election
surrogate.”

38. input to deliberative
processes

42. BREXIT

44. parties are mechanisms of
reducing complexity in
representative systems of
governments

45. new capabilities re:
complexity
→
new assumptions re:
representation

46. Future democratic systems will
be much more effective at
managing and integrating
qualitative signals

47. Let’s use open source
data science to reinvent
participation & deliberation

48. @colinmegill
https://pol.is