Policy

Province of South Holland

Polis is a participation platform that lets you present statements to your target group. The algorithm shows you both the shared values and the contradictions of the group. This gives you important insights into a participation process around a complex issue.

Last change on 21st of May 2024, at 9:34 (CET) | Publication Standard 1.0

• Publication category: Impactful algorithms
• Impact assessment: DPIA
• Status: In development

General information

Theme

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Begin date

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Contact information

[e-mail]

Link to publication website

https://www.zuid-holland.nl/politiek-bestuur/feiten-cijfers/algoritmeregister/

Link to source registration

https://www.zuid-holland.nl/politiek-bestuur/feiten-cijfers/algoritmeregister/

Responsible use

Goal and impact

The province of South Holland names participation as an essential part of decisive governance in the coalition agreement 2023 - 2027. With Polis, we enable a new form of participation for residents on the province's policies.

Considerations

Much of the public debate around social issues currently takes place on commercial platforms. The functioning of-and what choices are made by-the algorithms are only visible to the supplier. In many cases, these use algorithms that polarize the conversation.

The algorithms used in the Polis platform were chosen to explore the range of opinions on a topic and to reach consensus. In doing so, the algorithms used are open source, so that further research can take place into how the models work.

Human intervention

Setting up the Polis conversation takes place in consultation with the officials concerned. During the Policy conversation, moderators watch and, if necessary, approve new statements. After the conversation, data analysis takes place with the help of a data analyst.

Risk management

Risks regarding the use of Polis are monitored on an ongoing basis, as part of the regular management processes within the organisation. No specific risks are foreseen for these algorithms.

Legal basis

Environment Act

Impact assessment

DPIA: x

Operations

Data

Policy users register via Keycloak (an Identity and Access Management application). The admin can set what data to register in the Keycloak database. The minimum data is a user (name), which is linked to an ID hash (a willikeurige code).

Technical design

Polis is an open-source, real-time system for collecting, analysing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning.

Polis was developed in 2014 dor the Computational Democracy Project (https://compdemocracy.org/). A detailed description of how the algorithm works can be found here: https://compdemocracy.org/algorithms

In the Netherlands, the Bernoulli Institute is conducting research on how the Polis algorithm works. More information: https://www.rug.nl/research/bernoulli/

External provider

The original Polis codebase was developed by the Computational Democracy Project. In the Netherlands, BetaBreak and ICTU are currently working to further develop the code.

Link to code base

https://gitlab.com/particiapp https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis https://github.com/ICTU https://compdemocracy.org/algorithms