← Explore Product Gaps
Product Gap

Opinion Mapper

Impact:
Medium
Project Size:
Large
Urgent

What

Tool that connects to recording devices and data sources to instantly analyze participant contributions, creating real-time visualizations of views, consensus areas, and divisions on any topic throughout deliberative processes.

Why

Faster group understanding of viewpoints ↑, enable focused deliberation ↑ on key disagreements, increase awareness of common ground ↑

Problem Definition

Understanding participant views on topics takes significant time in deliberations, with clarity often emerging only near the end. This leaves tacit information unutilized throughout the process. Most processes lack real-time visibility into progress, consensus and division points, limiting facilitators’ ability to adapt and focus discussions effectively.

Definition of Success

Automatically create legible visualizations of viewpoints, including showing consensus and division. For a Citizens’ Assembly: enable real-time process adaptation based on emerging group dynamics.

Requirements

  • Core Processing: data labeling and argument extraction; semantic clustering across multiple data types; and process live audio and text inputs with low latency.
  • Visualization: basic semantic heat maps; adaptive visualization on demand; demographic overlay analysis; temporal tracking of opinion shifts; and queryable data interface.
  • Integration: connection to in-room recording devices; support for online participation platforms; and export capabilities for reporting.

Existing Limitations

Current approaches rely on pre-defined surveys (deliberative polling) that don’t capture ad-hoc topics and aren’t shared with participants. Manual surveys are resource-intensive and limited in scope. Online tools like Polis require critical mass before generating useful maps. Existing solutions from Dembrane, DeliberAIde, Talk to the City, and UK’s Consult offer partial capabilities but currently lack real-time, in-room integration. Taiwan’s TttC-Polis integration shows promise but isn’t widely available.

Milestones

  1. Manual data upload with ~1 hour analysis turnaround and preset visualizations.
  2. Manual data input by participants.
  3. Live data collection through recording and visual capture with real-time analysis and multiple visualization options.

Starting Points

  1. Build on Talk to the City and Consult open-source repositories.
  2. Test with deliberative practitioners for utility validation.

Related Capabilities

Routing and synthesizing

Informedness
Ability to route and synthesize data, revealing critical information, e.g. identifying common ground, high-potential ideas, thoughtful perspectives, insightful experiences, cruxes, forecasts, while helping to minimize the time required to do tasks.
Resources (6) Research Questions (3) Product Gaps (1)

Enable reason-giving

Deliberation
Ability to facilitate mutual understanding and reason-giving, including by supporting the development of critical thinking skills and preferences in individuals.
Resources (8) Research Questions (8) Product Gaps (2)

Aggregate perspectives

Representativeness
Ability to aggregate votes and distill more complex forms of open-ended input into outputs and decisions, in fair and understandable ways, such that participants feel their contributions are meaningfully taken into account (and can ideally see how).
Resources (14) Research Questions (8) Product Gaps (1)

Related Dimensions

Substantiveness

The extent to which decisions are substantive (e.g., actionable, consequential) rather than nonsubstantive (e.g., vague, simplistic, inconsequential). To what extent: Is the decision directly actionable and implementable? Does the decision meaningfully address the issues? Does the decision grapple with the necessary levels of complexity? Is uncertainty appropriately managed and accounted for? Are risks to implementability accounted for?

Informedness

The extent to which those making decisions understand the information critical to making that decision. To what extent: Do participants gain critical context about tradeoffs and consequences of different decisions? Is this sourced from: Experts? The existing authorities, who may have extensive context? A broad diversity of constituents? The most impacted stakeholders? The powerful stakeholders, whose incentives are critical to having the decision “stick”?

Related Goals

Collective input of many form factors that is quickly and meaningfully synthesized, and that fairly reflects participant perspectives.

Distilled and aggregated content that is integrated effectively into the process.

Effectively support participants in finding common ground.