npstorey
Hi! Liz - your testimony was excellent, and thanks for sharing the updates Noel. I have spent some time today going through testimony transcripts and translating them into statements on this Pol.is poll: http://bit.ly/NYCcharterPolis (I only made it through The Bronx). Before I go any further, I'd like to check in to see if people think this is useful, and if anyone wants to collaborate (I could use some help reviewing testimony). Additionally, the People's Charter reading group (http://bit.ly/peoplescharter) could be another source for ideas to submit to the commission and add to the pol.is poll. Basically, I think there are a lot more people who would engage in the charter review process if there were some easier ways to participate, and I think it's a great fit for a Pol.is experiment in NYC. Obviously there are many more ways the charter review process could be improved, but I think that it would be powerful if the civic tech and vnyc communities demonstrated a small piece of what a more participatory process could look like. What do you think?
pol.is
NYC is reviewing our city charter (kind of like our city's constitution). You can submit an official idea on <http://www.charter2019.nyc/> But maybe you don't have time for that? Join the NYC civic tech community in a listening at scale experiment. We are reviewing all of the testimony and parsing out statements that you can agree or disagree with. This will generate useful data about what may more New Yorkers think about the ideas being proposed to the charter review commission. Take a few minutes and vote on a few ideas! Want to dig deeper? Join the People Charter reading group at <http://bit.ly/peoplescharter>
patcon
Seems like an awesome idea Nathan! What about putting all candidate statements into a spreadsheet first? That would make review and de-duping simpler.
Lots of different philosophies, but my experience in another pilot was that 100 statements was decent upper limit (although that was before the "number remaining" UI was there, so it is less confusing now)
I have not yet gone through all statements (bc once i view i wont get to review), but what about culling it down to a smaller number of really differentiated seed statements, and let people flesh it out to a larger number based on what they feel missing. I personally feel that the more space there is for engagement (not just voting, but adding new statements), the healthier to dialogue. Seed statements are (in one frame), just intended to be enough to remove the intimidation of the blank canvas, but not trying to nail every possible improvement that participants might add :)
Spreadsheet might also help moderators deduplicate as participants submitted statements start to roll in
Anyhow, love this approach! <3
Lots of different philosophies, but my experience in another pilot was that 100 statements was decent upper limit (although that was before the "number remaining" UI was there, so it is less confusing now)
I have not yet gone through all statements (bc once i view i wont get to review), but what about culling it down to a smaller number of really differentiated seed statements, and let people flesh it out to a larger number based on what they feel missing. I personally feel that the more space there is for engagement (not just voting, but adding new statements), the healthier to dialogue. Seed statements are (in one frame), just intended to be enough to remove the intimidation of the blank canvas, but not trying to nail every possible improvement that participants might add :)
Spreadsheet might also help moderators deduplicate as participants submitted statements start to roll in
Anyhow, love this approach! <3
npstorey
Thanks for the feedback patcon. Very helpful, especially the insights about limiting the seed statements to 100. Agreed that a good workflow for creating seed statements is to use a spreadsheet first. Luckily I already did this 🙂. There is an Airtable I can give access to anyone who wants to review the statements. I think that a lot of the statements I included were too specific. I was trying to get everything thing I could out of the Bronx testimony, but if this was done for all of the other testimony it would result in too many statements. With that in mind I will look for less specific and more differentiated statements when I review more testimony. Anyone here interested in reviewing testimony to look for seed statements?
itsmisscs
Polis crew has been running conversations with more than 100 statements. I recommend less on the seed statement front, part of the design is getting contributions from people
itsmisscs
I think this is a great idea though. I don’t have bandwidth until next week. When are you aiming to have it done?
patcon
@nathan.p.storey patrick.c.connolly@gmail.com
npstorey
Thanks @itsmisscs and @patcon! I gave both of you full edit rights on the airtable. Anyone else can look at/comment on the table here: https://airtable.com/invite/l?inviteId=invUFrq8qhhJjTwyt&inviteToken=17861df512be64b596bac0535033c285c35d068b4906462ad14cd73000d46d36 (let me know if you want edit rights).
npstorey
There's no immediate rush on this because no one is asking us to do it, but sooner in the charter revision process is better. I might not have too much time to work on this until next week too. If there's interest do people want to meet up in person about this, maybe late afternoon Friday, Oct 12?
lizbarry
i'll be out of town by then, but i'm still interested in working on this.
lizbarry
The other point id like to offer is that Pol.is is not as good at voting functions. it's better for parsing out subtle variations in attitude than prioritizing among a list of all pretty good ideas
lizbarry
like, i'm not going to disagree with a pretty OK idea, i'll agree with it the same as i'd agree with a really great idea. So it doesn't prioritize well among a set of pretty decent ideas.
lizbarry
does this make sense?
lizbarry
this platform specifically sets the question then offers two ideas randomly for you to pick among. Out of all the times it was picked over others, an idea rises to the top http://allourideas.org/planyc_example?guides=true
lizbarry
I wonder if in the airtable, if we begin adding categories as another tag, and then do a visualization of the idea space
lizbarry
perhaps highlighting which chapters people are very interested in updating VS which ideas are completely novel and are not yet represented anywhere in the current Charter
npstorey
Liz - glad that you are interested in working on this, and that you for adding your thoughts. As I have been parsing out statements I had started to have the suspicion that polis might not be ideal for the exact reason that you mentioned - most of the ideas are framed in such a way that it's hard to disagree with them. There are ideas that get a little more nuanced, but those end up getting pretty technical. I'm not sure that the allourideas platform would solve this issue (although I agree it could be better and is worth considering). I think you are right that adding categories is a good idea - mass participation using an online tool like polis or allourideas might work better if it is limited to a single category, like land use. I could also see allourideas being more useful for novel ideas. Regardless, I'm going to try to finish a complete parsing of the testimony this week. If anyone wants to jump in on the Airtable, I added a category column as Liz suggested. Could be useful to have somebody else start categorizing the statements I parsed. We can skip trying to meet this week and keep working on this thread.
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