Polis has been credited for assisting the passage of legislation in Taiwan.[2][3] Polis has also been used in America, Canada, and Singapore.[4]
Colin Megill is one of the cofounders of Pol.is along with Christopher Small and Michael Bjorkegren who built it after Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring.[4]
vTaiwan has used pol.is as "one of the key parts" of its suite of open-source tools in its citizen engagement efforts.[5] vTaiwan claims that of the 26 national issues related to technology were discussed on the platform and 80% led to government action.[4][5]
Pol.is is also utilized by "Join," a national platform for online deliberation run by the Tiwanese government.[6][7] By 2018, "Join" had 5 million users, more than vTaiwan had up until that point.[5] Megill credits Tang and CL Kao, a cofounder of g0v, with convincing him to open-source pol.is.[8]
Andrew Leonard describes Pol.is as being intended as an antidote to the divisiveness of traditional internet discourse.[8] Audrey Tang agreed saying, "Polis is quite well known in that it's a kind of social media that instead of polarizing people to drive so called engagement or addiction or attention, it automatically drives bridge making narratives and statements. So only the ideas that speak to both sides or to multiple sides will gain prominence in Polis."[9]
Darshana Narayanan, in an op-ed in the Economist, argues that open-source machine-learning-based tools like Polis can help to bypass the influence of special interests or experts.[11]
^Richman, Josh (2024-02-27). "Podcast Episode: Open Source Beats Authoritarianism". Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved 2024-07-14. Polis is quite well known in that it's a kind of social media that instead of polarizing people to drive so called engagement or addiction or attention, it automatically drives bridge making narratives and statements. So only the ideas that speak to both sides or to multiple sides will gain prominence in Polis. And then the algorithm surfaces to the top so that people understand, oh, despite our seeming differences that were magnified by mainstream and other antisocial media, there are common grounds...
