Certainly. If you go to any Pol.is conversation, you see one sentiment of your fellow citizen. Of course, the first thing that you will see is whatever preparatory materials that we calculated to make it eye-catching for the first five seconds, and then provides just sufficient inform in the next 25 seconds.
We’re pretty scientific about this, in that we bring people who are not stakeholders and try to make them read through it. After which, you will see one sentiment from your fellow citizen, in which you can click yes or no, whether you agree or not, or you want to skip.
After you click yes or no, then your avatar in the two-dimension space, immediately after the one sentiment, begins to move among two to five groups of people. As you answer one statement, another one will appear.
As you answer more statements, the system gets more confidence in which group you are most similar to. The math for this is called principal component analysis. Any time the principal component changes, the x-axis gets redrawn, and the second principal component gets mapped to the y-axis in the multi-dimensional space.
We seed the initial nine statements using the initial input of all the stakeholders, like what’s their fighting points. After answering the first few, everybody can write in more eclectic feelings that they feel about this issue, in a free-form, open questionnaire. Whatever they write ends up being voted on by other fellow citizens.
If they want to sign in with Twitter or Facebook, they see the positions over their Twitter or Facebook frames, over the map. They discover that they are not actually enemies. It’s just they never talk about this over dinner.