Polis Meetup

​Short talks followed by dinner & networking. Meet other researchers, practitioners and technologists working on and with digital tools for public participation. Speakers:

​Colin Megill @colinmegill is the cofounder of Polis and board president of the Computational Democracy Project, the 501c3 which maintains the codebase and the primary free instance at pol.is/home. He will lead a discussion about his lifetime ambition: transitioning representative democracies to organizing mechanisms better than parties.

​Sarah Castell is the CEO of Involve. She will give an overview of the public participation landscape in the UK.

​Oli Whittington @oliwhittington leads democratic innovation in the Centre for Collective Intelligence Design at Nesta. He will explore why we often fail to move beyond individual pilots, and designing ways in which we can mainstream and scale digital democracy — and if scale is even the right objective.

​Simon Parker @SimonFParker, Director of Transformation and Policy Capability at the Department for Education, has been experimenting with using Polis internally in the civil service. He promises to share an astonishing new insight with us.

​Akshaya Satheesh @codewithshaya is a developer at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos. She will share CASMs experiments using Polis to understand issues such as Covid-19 misinformation and public attitudes on responsible technology.

​Ruth Wetters @ruthwetters is a data scientist who has worked on visualisations for Polis. She'll talk about designing democratic tools in AI, and the ways in which Polis promotes transparency, accessibility and security.