geo.pol.is

What is geo.pol.is?

Geo.pol.is is a new form of social media powered by pol.is. pol.is is open source technology that identifies shared consensus across diverse groups, even amid apparent polarization. pol.is has powered groundbreaking policy excercises at nation scale, is deployed by multiple national governments, and was the inspiration for Twitter's Community Notes.

Geo.pol.is enables communities of any scale — from local neighborhoods to entire nations — to automatically map divides and discover and share bold consensus that unite stakeholders across historic divides, all as open data.

Geo.pol.is is maintained by The Computational Democracy Project (CompDem), a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit that develops and maintains pol.is. There are no shareholders, no tracking, no surveillance, and no advertising. All conversations generate downloadable open data that belongs to the public - not to any government or corporation or interest group.

How geo.pol.is Works

In one sentence: each geo.pol.is is like a subreddit, for a location (like a city, county, state, or country), with an invite tree seeded by a nonpartisan organization with local roots, that outputs "collective statements" that fulfil certain statistical criteria based on crowd voting patterns (rather than the output being posts by individuals). It is completely created by the people, and the open source technology.

CompDem partners with established organizations with strong local roots in each place to ensure conversations reach diverse populations within a specific location. You can find information about our partner organizations on the geo.pol.is page for each location.

Geo.pol.is is also a standard, opinionated configuration for Polis 2, which is open source and available for any organization to fork, deploy, or pay for as SaaS and use as they like.

Getting invited to a conversation

Pol.is' invitation system ensures anonymous but verified participation, fostering more constructive dialogue than traditional social media.

• Partner organizations receive initial invitations to distribute to the most diverse possible starting group
• Participants can invite others in successive waves - anyone who lives, works, or has a stake should be invited to participate in the geo.pol.is conversation for a specific place
• You can be invited by a partner organization, or by someone you know, and you can join multiple conversations for multiple places (like a city and a country)

Participating

• Select your topics of interest - this sets the agenda for what everyone will vote on
• Vote on others' comments — agree, disagree, or pass (there's no reply)
• Submit your own comments about issues that matter to you - topics are based on comments submitted by everyone
• Mark which comments are especially important to you - check the importance checkbox

Results

• Statistical analysis identifies patterns—popular topics, areas of consensus, and points of disagreement
• Collective statements appear that reflect agreement across all groups, citing underlying comments and votes
• All data remains publicly accessible for ongoing reference and use

This scalable process works with dozens to hundreds of thousands of participants, consistently finding common ground even on contentious issues.

Why Your Participation Matters

As communities seek input on important decisions, traditional polling methods and for profit social media often create as many problems as they solve. Social media amplifies conflict, comment sections get disabled, and surveys miss the nuance of genuine community dialogue.

geo.pol.is takes a fundamentally different approach: it's designed to discover common ground and build understanding, not to maximize engagement through controversy.

The outputs of individual pol.is conversations have been used by governments, news organizations, and other organizations to inform policy and decision-making, but usually take complex processes to produce. Many deliberative processes (like citizen assemblies) take millions of dollars and years to produce. geo.pol.is is designed to be a simple, open, and transparent way to discover common ground and build understanding for policy processes as a standard unit of infrastructure that can inform many subsequent processes.

See It In Action

Explore real conversations happening in communities worldwide. Each conversation shows how people with different viewpoints can find surprising consensus on the issues that matter to them.