colinmegill
commented
3 years ago This is a very common research task and all normal quantitative platforms allow it, but it's at odds with Polis as a platform. Many organizations do in fact use Polis this way.
The right thing to do here is to use xid. https://compdemocracy.org/xid/
Participants are guided through a series of questions using a platform like Qualtrics or Google Forms, and, at the point at which the research wants to know what participants think in their own words, they are, at that step, referred to Polis.
The reasons for this are as follows:
- Polis is not intended to be a general survey platform, it's good at one thing and that's a strength.
- Keeping Polis scoped and focusing on core problems increases our overall efficiency at delivering on that one thing.
- Flexibly working with any other existing platform has meant that Polis is highly flexible, and has API surfaces with other tools that get better over time rather than more brittle.
- The platform gives power to participants to speak in their own words and people generally vote on average between 25 and 120 comments, a tighter estimate would be 40-80 comments. If 20 comments are explicitly ordered, this cuts into the number of 'own voice' statements which will be voted on, perhaps by 50%.
I suppose at some point we have to say out loud that Polis was built on, and follows, the Unix Philosophy http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html. We have a lot of opportunities to get even better at this, especially with data export.
Reticketed from 2021-01-09 call, in response to questions from Angie (@dataHumanist).
Angie has a particular narrative she's hoping to build with her use of polis. She wishes to build to asking certain questions, so as not to cause people to get uncomfortable bc they see a triggering statement as the first one. She alluded to how in real conversations, the order of information/questions/engagement is important, and part of humanizing the process of discovery and dialogue. It felt a bit unnatural to be unable to ensure that a jarring statement was not the first thing encountered -- she wished to work up to those after building some degree of trust or buy-in.
Feature that might be partial solution: Add ability to skip routing and direct link to specific statement for voting https://github.com/pol-is/polis/issues/696