Introducing Viewpoints.xyz

A free community mediation tool

Viewpoints is a community mediation tool. It shows you how people agree and disagree so you can figure out a way forward. 

I would love your help testing it. 

For your sake I hope you disagree

Within any group of people there are important debates. What they should have for dinner, who should lead the group, how they should remodel the community centre. 

And there are answers to these questions, whether the group knows it or not. If asked, they would happily have a Chinese takeaway, Sean would get more support than anyone else (though he’d never put himself up for a vote), there could be a new community building with lots of housing but only if there were some payments to the community as well.

But how can I figure out what agreements would be acceptable to my community? Viewpoints lets polling them be a 5 minute activity and it sorts answers by consensus. It shows me the kinds of answers that bring people together and the kind that would drive them apart.

It is easy to use. I can write a 20 statement poll in a couple of minutes and with tinder-style swipey voting, the whole room can vote in another 2. It supports link sharing and generates QR codes.

The tool is good, but not perfect. I’ve run many online polls and 3 in-person sessions. It does help me understand a room better. But I need to run a lot more sessions before I think it really delivers value. That’s where you come in.

I want people to use it. The tool is currently free to use - it is open source and funded by Vitalik Buterin. Please try it in your community and tell me how it goes. 

My dream uses would be:

• Solve a planning dispute

• Help a church figure out a sticky issue

• Help a community avoid a crisis

If you have a community (or several) I hope that figuring out points of agreement and disagreement fast can help you avoid repetition, solve arguments and help you to spend your time better. 

Try it at viewpoints.xyz

Or you can create a poll directly using this link https://viewpoints.xyz/new-poll 

Or book a user interview here: https://savvycal.com/nathanpmyoung/viewpoints or email me at nathanpmyoung@gmail.com

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The rest of this article contains the full features, some personal background and my experiences from events.

Features

The features are as follows:

• 2 minute poll creation

• Sharing via link

• Generates QR code

• Anonymous responses

• Tinder-style swipe responses

• 4 responses - agree, disagree, don’t know, badly framed

• Github repo (if you want to look at the code): https://github.com/Goodheart-Labs/viewpoints.xyz 

This is the whole setup and it will generate the slug automatically

I am also experimenting with other features:

• Clustering - like pol.is I want to see what the relevant subclusters of a group are

• Demographic questions 

I need to run a lot more sessions before I can confidently say it will solve your community problems, but for me it is a really interesting tool which informs how I move in communities. 

Backstory

I have thought about good discussions for over a decade. I used my Facebook wall as a town hall, asking about breaking news and trying to create a chill space for discussion. Over time, I learned that people responded better the less they had to work - I got a lot more responses when people could reply using  facebook reactions rather than making them type full comments. 

I wanted to get to consensus. How could I find ways to get large and perhaps conflicting groups of people to agree? Whether we like each other or not, we have to live in the same cities, countries and planet. I have a deep hunger for finding solutions that are mutually beneficial.

I learned about Pol.is, but I found it hard to use. Pol.is is a great open source tool. It’s the clear ancestor of Viewpoints. But I often found that once I’d run a poll there wasn’t a clear “what next”. Viewpoints was an attempted answer to that. Sorting the results by consensus and conflict makes it easy to talk to a group and show them around the results, perhaps as a precursor to discussion or more voting. And with viewpoints the whole process is really quick and easy.

The ultimate aim is that communities that understand themselves can solve problems. They know what things different parts of them value and what trades will keep everyone on board. My guess is that a skilled mediator can help avoid community strife - either by allowing for a peaceful breakup or trust building and coexistence between different subgroups. 

Viewpoints is the next step along this road. I recommend you ask your community members on stuck questions and see what comes back, you might be surprised at some of the common answers. I have been!

Real world examples

AI London

I ran a poll at the beginning and end of the AI London event. The first was to find disagreement, the second to find agreement. The event was to bring together two groups who deeply disagree. I am glad that we despite that, there was some important agreement.

vTaiwan (Not Viewpoints! This is about Pol.is)

Pol.is, which inspired viewpoints, has some big successes of its own. One example is in Taiwan, where there was a disagreement over making alcohol easier to buy online. Some wanted it, some were concerned that children would use apps while lying about their age. Rather than the process stalling, vTaiwan (which uses Pol.is) helped suggest a mutually agreeable solution. The orders could be delivered to local convenience stores and then adults could collect them with ID. I have taken this example from this article, in the MIT Technological Review. 

Community Norms

A community I’m involved in was working through some alleged bad community behaviour. This led to suggestions for sets of norms. In my opinion, it was hard to discuss the whole list at once, and hard to push back publicly. I created a poll so people could say whether they agreed or disagreed with individual points. This gave a new set of norms which stripped out a few that many disagreed with leaving a more consensus set. I would guess that greater consensus means the norms are more likely to be followed.

Thank yous

Thank you to Vitalik Buterin for funding this work and to Jamie Rumbelow, Joe Reeve and Apex Labs for their parts in building it. Also thanks to the Pol.is team inspiring Viewpoints and to everyone I interviewed as part of the development. 

How can we stay involved?

You can join the Viewpoints whatsapp here, but most importantly, try and use it in your community, religious group or job. 

viewpoints.xyz

Thanks for reading.