Polis: Allow sharing a read-only view of conversations

[patcon]

Reticketed from 2021-01-09 call, in response to questions from Angie (@dataHumanist).

Angie mentioned that in some circumstances, she wishes to share the visualization with people, but doesn't wish for them to be able to participate.

(This would also better allow users to better share exemplar conversations, which can help newcomers understand how polis works once it gets going -- but without the worry or need to caveat the showing with "but pls don't participate, or you'll mess up their data)

[colinmegill]

This is an interesting and unique feature.

Follow up questions... could it just be sharing the report after the conversation is closed? Is this regarding doing something in real time?

[patcon]

It definitely would've been helpful to us (@ballPointPenguin @dsiddarth and me) as we were trying to think how to share learnings from real and interesting convos in walkthrough videos. We wanted to communicate to new people how a vibrant conversation looks and feels, and the complex stories that the data unveils through exploration. But we didn't want to invite people whose exploratory participation might collapse the visualization (and the narrative).

The report wouldn't have been useful for us above, since it wouldn't prime newcomers for how the tool could work for them. And it's quite overload for all but the most hardcore data-lovers.

Is this regarding doing something in real time?

Thoughtful and intentional facilitators might want to rah-rah-rah about an evolving conversation, but not spoil their carefully curated stakeholder audience. Read-only opens up avenues for polis to be both a participatory sport and a spectator sport. Basically, read-only views feel like they would allow more amplification of polis (spreading the good word), whereas currently, read-write view means ppl who are otherwise super-fans have incentives _not_ to share conversations or lean on them as learning tools.

What about you @dataHumanist? What was the reason behind your ask?

[metasoarous]

Thanks for moving this over @patcon.

This could potentially empower more flexible embedding layouts, which could be useful.

However, for sharing a fully formed conversations without having to worry about collapsing the visualization/narrative, we have a special conversations for that: https://pol.is/2demo. Please feel free to use this for these purposes in the future.

@datahumanist Please let us know if you have some additional context here.

Thanks again

[patcon]

Thanks Chris! That conversation has been helpful a few times :)

But different audiences are most engaged by different narratives and different polis convos. Maybe I want to show how the story of 5 opinion groups can invite complexity back into discussion, or how polis can serve a small 20-person group, or how polis could serve a community of colour. Each might call for different stories, and that context is best read by people at the edges -- each person designing the experience/intro for the audience they're sharing with. One demo can't satisfy all. There are as many optimal ways to tell stories as there are groups :)

Maybe it's that the conversational nature/strengths of polis feels particularly well-served in making itself dispersible through "real" conversations ❤️ (why the feature request connected with me)

[colinmegill]

+1 to Pat's experience sharing different engagements.

Also +1 to fear that a single vote might go from 5 groups to 2, that is a separate issue for @metasoarous :) and potentially @ThenWho, re: LeidenAlg.

I don't presently have a vision of what active but readonly would mean. Only closed. That is to say, we do have a read-only mode already implemented, closed, and we do need to make that available in the admin dash convo config.

[patcon]

we do have a read-only mode already implemented, closed, and we do need to make that available in the admin dash convo config

Good point. (#126) You're right, it's def just a bonus if it can have view-only access while still active/running.

I don't presently have a vision of what active but readonly would mean.

As for what it (non-urgently) could work like, first-pass proposal:

• easy: just hide vote widget and submit widget, so just explorable viz
• stretch: replace vote widget with comment "carousel" kinda deal

full access: https://pol.is/3ntrtcehas

3ntrtcehas == [salted?] hash ==> 8b6ea50a4a796953693a577f7d68a20dd7b5eec8

view-only: https://pol.is/view/8b6ea50a4a796953693a577f7d68a20dd7b5eec8

[ThenWho]

TL;DR At the moment I think it's best to go for the 'closed' convo option, but there are bigger issues here: who is allowed to participate in a democratic process? Which use cases does polis support?

---

I think this circles back to having two quite different use cases for polis, and possibly more:

• one for (significantly) less than Dunbar number of participants and
• one for (significantly) more.

The primary one, as I understand it, is the latter, and the one that I fell in love with :slightly_smiling_face: . This is where the community detection shines and the one where polis has a unique advantage. For the former one, there are many tools that can be used besides polis. The smaller the number of participants, the more it makes sense to engage people in free form and in small groups, online and offline.

Having said that, it is true that most people use polis for the former case, and there are very few convos to date at the scale of the latter. As @patcon says, these people act as ambassadors for the platform too, and I even buy into the spectator sport part :smiley: , as a bridge between the two use cases.

I'd like to support facilitators but at the moment I think this is best done with the 'closed' option that @colinmegill suggests.

Bigger picture-wise, I think there is a need for a seperate discussion where we put down on 'paper' how different use cases look like, how we can best support them, and which ones. There are many configurations here and plenty of devils in the details. For example:

• Is it better to make it an option to allow statement submissions at all?
  
  
  
  • I.e. if 20 people participate in total, and the 10th person submits a statement, only half will have the chance to vote on it.
  
  
  • Wouldn't make sense to first collect all statements and then run a normal poll, or even a modified polis to take advantage of the viz?
  
  
• Speaking of which, is it possible to offer the viz + algos seperately, so that people can run them on their own collected data?
  
  
  
  • That will reduce requests that are out of scope for polis, leading to a better UX, but does it make any sense to support it?
  
  
• Are there different classes of participants?
  
  
  
  • We already have moderators and participants, but what about 'facilitators', 'core stakeholders', 'voters', 'spectators', 'representatives' etc.
  
  
  • (Polis was built on the idea of direct democracy, and personally I had some hope of moderators phasing away at some distant point in time..)
  
  
• Are geographic criteria a concern? Do we want to allow people to participate only within a specific area?
• What about having a specific profile?
  
  
  
  • Would be e.g. very useful to increase trust when engaging a minority group, but can also be exploited when used in scale.
  
  
• And a topic that is implied in this thread and deserves it's own discussion:

_Who is allowed to participate in a democratic process?_

In the old days, it was 'whoever showed up', now it is 'whoever has the link'. Might not be the best way, but it is clear, UX-wise. In large convos, this potentially invites 4chan at your doorstep (thankfully not the case yet), in smaller convos legitimate concerns like the ones @patcon detailed above (cf "curated stakeholders"). Choices, choices, choices :slightly_smiling_face:

(To be clear, my heart goes to both of these extreme use cases - I have used polis as a facilitation tool for a smaller group of people, and works very well for surfacing small voices that would otherwise go unheard. I took a strong stance above to show that these are core questions for polis, leading to possibly opposite directions. I hope I'm wrong. They are definitely not easy topics to handle, but they _will_ keep coming up.)

EDIT: Bulletized for readability.

[ThenWho]

My deepest apologies for the super long text 🙏🏼

[metasoarous]

Thanks for sharing these thoughts @ThenWho.

You identify a number of very good points about who has access to the participate in the conversation.

A lot of these considerations ultimately come down to process design. In the facilitations we do with partner organizations, we typically decide on a strategy for who will be participating, and have a few different mechanisms for supporting different levels of access:

• requiring social login
• use of the xid system
  
  
  
  • the can allow a website in which polis is embedded to manage identity
  
  
  • or can be used to issue (potentially single-use) access links which will maintain identity
  
  

For sussing out the different between arbitrary participants and vested stakeholders, either of these system (though typically xid) can be used to sort out who is who in post-analysis; This doesn't happen in the built-in visualization or automated report, and would probably be hard to get right for the general use case, since the details can potentially vary so greatly.

Getting people to come back to a conversation when there are new comments is a high priority for us. We've decided that we need to resurrect the email notifications, as mentioned elsewhere (and now reflected in #763 and #766; also see #121, #114 for related issues).

Thanks again

[ThenWho]

Thanks @metasoarous ! On yesterday's community call (notes here) we talked about the xid, and between that and your answer, I have a much better understanding now. I agree, this solves a lot of the (potential) problems I mentioned or, at a minimum, is a very good lens to look at them.

Over time we'll need to explain the role of xid a bit more in the online resources, especially if the intention is to be a multitool as described here. I admit I looked it up in the knowledgebase maybe a week ago but the text didn't clarify it for me.

On more thing: in yesterday's call, Christina mentioned that it's not clear who the user of polis is, and touched on topics such as UX, user-first development and similar (I'm paraphrasing here a bit). It might be relevant in this discussion too, i.e. some grouping of resources in the knowledgebase centered around different target groups of users, with how xid can be used to tailor polis for alternative processes etc.

Thanks again for your comment! Getting people back to the convo is a worthy goal and I'm happy to see it prioritized. I'll try to help any way that I can 🙂

[dataHumanist]

Thank-you for these thoughts & suggestions @patcon @colinmegill.

To provide more context, my work is focused on co-design with multiple stakeholders and facilitating collaborative sessions for multi-lateral system transformation. The company I recently joined is becoming more serious about their use of data, while I'm becoming more focused on conversational design, and multidirectional data flows.

If I was to design & launch a conversation among a group of stakeholders (e.g. an Indigenous community we're working within), I'd want the data gathered from these discussions to be accessible in real-time by co-designers to be able to iterate & pivot how they facilitate in response to what emerges. These facilitators are not representative of the target population and therefore they should have real- time read-only access but should not be inputting their opinions.

Our co-design journeys with our client partners are long-term (multi-year), and thus, closing the conversation may work if that function is made available. Maybe I need to create multiple conversations over time instead of thinking about it as one long conversation that shifts and emerges. This is new to me, so I'm just wrapping my head around what's possible.

Hope this context is useful.

[ThenWho]

@dataHumanist if I understand the above correctly, co-designers = facilitators = moderators (in polis language, i.e. approving incoming statements), and these are different than the participants/stakeholders. These co-designers could be you or someone else working at your company. Is that right or did I miss something?

[colinmegill]

Thanks for clarifying @dataHumanist!

I'm going to close this issue as it's verging on support (gitter is better) and there are already two forms of read only — the report and closing the conversation — so I don't see an issue which requires implementation here.

@dataHumanist the report is definitely what you're looking for. For example: https://pol.is/report/r2xcn2cdbmrzjmmuuytdk

Best of luck with your project.