February 12, 2026
Cop or consensus? Internet can't decide
Polis: Open-source platform to find common ground at scale
From Taiwan’s town halls to your group chat, can it tame chaos
TLDR: Polis 2.0, an open-source platform used by Taiwan and others, now scales to millions with automated topic maps and AI summaries. Commenters split between hope for cleaner debates and skepticism about “alternative facts,” joking about the name while asking to prove it on local issues first.
Polis 2.0 burst in promising to help whole cities and countries find common ground, and the comments went full reality check. One user dropped receipts with the site and open-source code, while skeptics asked: what happens when people believe “alternative facts”? Can consensus survive misinformation?
There was comedy too: a Swedish reader thought “Polis” meant police and blamed the blue‑and‑white theme, and another joked, “Damn you governor polish!” before admitting the tool looks intriguing. The dreamers want this in social media: clear, bite‑sized arguments, less mud, more common sense. The pragmatists say: prove it in small towns first, then talk about saving democracy.
For non‑tech readers, here’s the promise in plain talk: Polis 2.0 runs on big cloud servers to handle millions at once, groups people by how they vote, auto‑organizes topics into living folders, and uses AI to summarize in real time. That lets conversations stay open, filters toxic stuff, and turns huge debates into readable reports.
The receipts are strong: Taiwan, the UK, Finland, and even the UN have used earlier versions for real policies. But the vibe is split — hope versus hard‑nosed skepticism — with memes and side‑eye asking whether any tool can beat bad‑faith arguing online.
Key Points
- •CompDem introduced Polis 2.0, upgrading the open-source deliberation platform to support millions of simultaneous participants.
- •Polis has been deployed by national and local governments worldwide, including Taiwan, the UK, Finland, Singapore, the Philippines, and Austria, as well as UNDP programs.
- •Polis 2.0 adds real-time LLM-generated summaries, semantic topic clustering via the EVōC library, and end-to-end automation for seeding, moderation, clustering, and reporting.
- •Scalable cloud infrastructure enables 10–30x increases over Polis 1.0’s largest deployment (33,547 participants), with dynamic opinion mapping updated in real time.
- •Polis is developed by The Computational Democracy Project (CompDem), a U.S.-based nonprofit, and has been featured in major media outlets.