Mission of the Pollite Organization

The Pollite Organization is a non-profit enterprise dedicated to improving the quantity, breadth, and quality of serious communication among all people. Our goal is to helppeople understand each other better and provide opportunities for them to identify common interests and beliefs. Broadly speaking, there are two main activities that we seek to facilitate:

Individuals expressing their own beliefs and opinions
Individuals researching the beliefs and opinions of others

Clearly, these activities are complementary: When we learn more about what others think, we grow in understanding of what underlies our own views, and we are able to more clearly identify what is unique about our experience and way of thinking. Naturally, this leads us to a more refined expression of our opinions.

These are simple ideas. Most of the same meaning can be captured using simple words like "dialogue" and "debate." In short, the Pollite Organization seeks to facilitate improved LARGE-SCALE dialogue and debate among ALL INDIVIDUALS, as contrasted with debate between representatives of large groups. Of course, we are all members of many categories, depending on our gender, nationality, ethnic background, religious belief, economic status, place of residence, etc., and these qualities are, to varying extents, part of our identity as perceived from within as well as by others. But we also each have the ability to learn about many issues and make up our own mind about our exact position on each of them, which will often contrast either slightly or dramatically with what might be expected of us based on our membership in these various identifiable groups.

Encouraging and facilitating this process of learning, evaluating, and expressing is the mission of the Pollite Organization.

More specifically, our goal is to provide free information services furthering the process of public debate as defined above. These systems should help all people express and compare their points of view.

The result of our providing these services should be several:

Increased ability of many different groups to coalesce into agreement on complex issues.
Greater efficiency and hence greater freedom of written expression.
Encouragement of the desire to be educated and informed, and to carefully consider one's point of view.

Our Strategic Principles

As a matter of strategy, we have formulated several principles to guide us on our mission.

We attempt to follow these principles as we implement and administer our systems. When faced with practical decisions, sometimes we find that these principles point in multiple directions. In these situations, we use our judgement to evaluate what measures will, in the long term, make the most progress on the overall goal of facilitating a broad yet detailed public debate.

Ubiquity and equality of access

Interfaces to our systems should be provided in a way that affords access to the greatest possible audience of users, although we may also provide more specialized interfaces for those who desire them. Our services should not dedicate resources to private communication among subgroups of our users. All content posted to our systems should be available for reading by all users.

Privacy through voluntary anonymity

Our services should allow people to express themselves without fear of reprisal from anyone. Users should therefore have the option to keep their own identity secret, while still being "visible" as an individual holding a coherent point of view. Users should also be free to divulge their identies if they so choose.

Decentralized control of agenda

We should not rely on hierarchical classifications of topics or ideas. Instead we should support a dynamic, organic model of the connections between ideas, which reflects the ongoing participation of all users.

Detailed and precise multilateral communication

Our services should provide the opportunity to make very complex arguments in a way that allows many others to respond to individual elements of the argument.

Long term refinement of debate

Opinions stored in our systems should persist for as long as they are deemed relevant by any user. It should be possible for users to revise their opinions, but other users should have the opportunity to respond separately to the different versions of an opinion.

Specificity of our mission

Mechanisms we provide do not have to be all things to all people. They are meant to plug currently percieved gaps in the infrastructure of discourse. We are not trying to replace email, news, chat, or other internet tools.

Noncommerciality

Our systems should not allow users to conduct economic transactions, or contain any advertising, because allowing these activities would dilute the impact of our systems and sow distrust of the service by our users. Information collected in our system should never be sold or made available via special (i.e. other than normal user) channels for use by any commercial enterprise, including any sponsor of our organization.

Authenticity and security

Our users should have all possible assurance that no one else can change information they post. We would prefer that a user not have multiple identities (accounts) on our systems, since this would allow her to unfairly magnify the apparent support for her position. However, we also want to avoid any real or percieved invasion of the privacy of our users in our processes of identity verification.

Safety

We should do our best to prevent usage of our services to cause harm to any user or other person. Of course any action on our part can be seen as censorship, so we must maintain a very restrained editorial control of our information services.

More info on the Pollite Organization