Who is Colin Megill?

When large numbers of people argue on an online message board, it usually turns into a quarrel. In Taiwan's discussion over Uber, it is often said, that did not happen, and points of agreement were found. The tool used then, "Polis", was built by this person and colleagues.

In short

Colin Megill is one of the founders of Polis (pol.is) [1][2]. In Polis, many people submit short statements online and press "agree" or "disagree" on one another's statements. From that alone, clusters of similar opinions (groups), and statements supported across groups, become visible. It is known for its use in vTaiwan, Taiwan's space for citizen participation [3].

In a 2014 profile, Megill appeared as the CEO of Polis, and said that since the Arab Spring and the 2007 financial crisis Megill had wondered whether web technology could help people act as a collective. The co-founder was Mike Bjorkegren, a former Amazon developer, and Chris Small joined early on the algorithm side [1].

Connection to Plurality

Named in a footnote of the book. Chapter 5-4 of the book, "Augmented Deliberation", presents Polis as the open-source software that vTaiwan uses. Its footnote cites the 2021 paper on Polis that Megill co-wrote. That footnote is where Megill's own name appears in the book [4].

A talk in Taiwan. In May 2016, at the g0v Summit in Taipei, Megill gave a talk titled "pol.is in Taiwan", explaining how Polis was used in vTaiwan, including in the discussion on regulating Uber [5]. There Megill also said that the first Polis conversation in Taiwan was started by Kao Chia-liang (clkao) of g0v [5].

Dialogue with Tang. In April 2018, Megill joined an online conversation with Audrey Tang and others [6]. The same year, MIT Technology Review quoted Megill as saying that a years-long deadlock over rules for online alcohol sales "resolved itself almost immediately" once it was discussed on vTaiwan, of which Polis is one of the tools [3].

Later work. In 2018, The Computational Democracy Project was set up as a nonprofit to carry on the open-source work of Polis [7]. In 2023, Megill was listed on the advisory committee for reviewing OpenAI's "Democratic Inputs to AI" grant program [8].

Main ideas

Making agreement visible instead of arguments. In Polis, rather than arguing in replies, people vote agree, disagree or pass on short statements. From those votes it shows the opinion groups and the statements supported across groups. Chapter 5-4 of the book explains that this design "builds abstractions of some of the principles of inclusive facilitation into its attention allocation and user experience" [4].

Polis and Community Notes as members of the same family. A 2022 paper by Megill and others set Polis alongside Community Notes on X (formerly Twitter; then called Birdwatch) as ranking systems that both bring to the surface statements widely supported by groups with different positions. It then proposes extending this idea into a system for mapping public opinion [9]. → Bridging

AI can scale up deliberation, but with risks. In 2023, Megill wrote a paper with researchers from the AI company Anthropic on the possibilities and risks of using large language models (LLMs) in Polis to summarize, to moderate submissions and to predict votes. It argues that a mechanism for human checking must be kept [10]. A tool in the same line is Talk to the City.

Further reading

1. Plurality, 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation", the paragraphs on Polis (English, book) — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/
2. MIT Technology Review, "The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws" (English, article, 2018) — https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simple-but-ingenious-system-taiwan-uses-to-crowdsource-its-laws/
3. "pol.is in Taiwan" (English, talk transcript, 2016) — https://medium.com/polis-blog/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5
4. "Polis: Scaling Deliberation by Mapping High Dimensional Opinion Spaces" (English, paper, 2021) — https://doi.org/10.6035/recerca.5516
5. ""Coherent Mode" for the World's Public Square" (English, paper, 2022) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12571
6. Broad Listening, 11-2 "The Birth of Polis" (Japanese and English, book) — https://broadlisteningbook.com/

Sources

1. GeekWire, "Startup Spotlight: Polis" (2014-04-18) — http://www.geekwire.com/2014/startup-spotlight-polis/
2. English Wikipedia, "Pol.is" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol.is ［CC BY-SA 4.0］
3. MIT Technology Review, "The simple but ingenious system Taiwan uses to crowdsource its laws" (2018-08-21) — https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/08/21/240284/the-simple-but-ingenious-system-taiwan-uses-to-crowdsource-its-laws/ ［MIT］
4. Plurality, 5-4 "Augmented Deliberation" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/5-4/eng/ ［CC0］
5. Colin Megill, "pol.is in Taiwan" (2016-05-14) — https://medium.com/polis-blog/pol-is-in-taiwan-da7570d372b5
6. Conversation with Tom Atlee and Colin Megill (2018-04-06) — https://github.com/audreyt/transcript/blob/main/2018-04-06-Conversation-with-Tom-Atlee-and-Colin-Megill.md ［CC0］
7. The Computational Democracy Project, "About" — https://compdemocracy.org/about/
8. OpenAI, "Democratic Inputs to AI" (2023-05-25) — https://openai.com/index/democratic-inputs-to-ai/
9. Megill, Barry and Small, ""Coherent Mode" for the World's Public Square" (2022) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.12571 ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］
10. "Opportunities and Risks of LLMs for Scalable Deliberation with Polis" (2023) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11932 ［CC BY-NC-ND 4.0］