The three ways in which you can participate are:

• Vote: Vote on other people's statements (click agree, disagree or pass/unsure).

• Join in: If you want to add to the conversation, submit your idea or comment in the box marked “Share your perspective”

• Share: Share the link to this virtual conversation with other people who live or work in the London Borough of Wandsworth. We want as many people with as many diverse views as possible to take part in this online engagement.  

This interactive survey called Polis is being used:

• to enable a borough wide conversation on the issue of Air Quality.

• so that the Citizens’ Assembly can receive feedback from the wider Wandsworth community on a variety of ideas

• to receive new ideas and input from the community 

• to better understand differences of opinion

• to identify areas of agreement 

We want to hear what you think!

Polis interactive surveys tend to generate lots of comments as they enable everyone in a local community to have their say. 

For this particular survey it started with a large number of ideas that came from the Air Quality Citizens’ Assembly. You can recognise those ideas by the AQCA in front of them. Please note these AQCA statements are not unanimous opinions of the Assembly or definite recommendations; they are simply ideas that the Assembly would like to have feedback on.

You don’t have to vote on all the statements unless you want to. Even spending 5-10 minutes voting on some of the statements provides rich feedback.

This survey will run for approximately 3 weeks starting Tuesday 28th March and closing on Monday 17th April. 

The Citizens’ Assembly will have access to all the submitted statements. New ideas, areas of agreement and disagreement that the platform identifies will be considered by the assembly as it puts together its final recommendations to Wandsworth Council.

Upon completion of the assembly Wandsworth Council will respond to all the Citizens’ Assembly recommendations, detailing what action will be taken and being clear if and why action on certain recommendations is not possible in either the short or longer term.  

A feature of the Polis platform is its ability to analyse a large amount of information. It identifies groups of people that vote in similar ways. So it can highlight different opinion groups and it can show statements where there is a high level of agreement across those opinion groups. It also identifies the most divisive statements. 

This will provide useful information for the Citizens’ Assembly regarding how local people feel about poor air quality and measures to reduce it. This information will also be made available to the general public when the final report of the Wandsworth Air Quality Citizens’ Assembly is published.

The visualisation is like a map of different ways of thinking about the issue by people responding to this question.

Each cluster shape represents a group of people that voted in similar ways. Click on a group shape to see statements that show their similar opinions (where they either similarly agree or disagree). These statements will appear below the visualisation. Click ‘Majority Opinion’ to see statements where a majority of participants, across all groups, voted similarly.

Showing different clusters of opinion gives everyone, including the Assembly a good idea of wider opinions that exist in the borough. 

The numbers seen in the opinion groups are simply the number of participants that voted similarly to make up that group. A higher number in one group than in another does not mean that group is ‘the winner’ like in a referendum. 

Submitted statements of all perspectives which respond to the question will be monitored every day and entered into the interactive survey by Shared Future, the independent facilitators of the Citizens’ Assembly.

The following kinds of submissions will be rejected

• Nonsense or irrelevant comments

• Anything which is off topic and doesn’t contribute in some way to the question being asked

• Abusive statements expressing prejudice on the basis of ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or similar grounds.

• Any comments which are clearly a duplication of previously submitted ideas  -in this case the first statement describing the idea is the most likely to be retained. 

• Comments which state more than one idea are confusing because a participant might want to agree with one idea and disagree with the other. In this case we reject this kind of comment, copy it and resubmit it as two comments.

There is an automatically generated report that will be made available when the final report of the Wandsworth Air Quality Citizens’ Assembly is published.

Polis is the online tool which this interactive survey uses. It lets you engage in a “conversation” with hundreds or even thousands of other participants. By grouping people who voted similarly it identifies different opinion groups and it also identifies agreement across the differences.

Polis has been used around the world to help groups understand themselves better, resolve conflicts, and even move forward out of complex debate. It has been used by a number of local and national governments (e.g. Taiwan, Canada, Austria).

Polis is open source software (the source code is freely available for anyone to access, use, modify, and distribute) created in the US by the Computational Democracy Project.

The version used for this public engagement is hosted on servers based in the UK under the management of the Crowd Wisdom Project. 

To find out more about the algorithms that Polis uses see this link on the Computational Democracy website.

No personal data will be collected. This survey is run completely anonymously and is UK GDPR compliant.

Please see this link for more information.   

For any other queries / concerns, please email Jayne of Shared Future at jayne.mcfadyen@sharedfuturecic.org.uk 

Shared Future CIC are the not-for-profit independent organisation that has been commissioned to facilitate the Wandsworth Citizens Assembly on Air Quality.