About

Converj is a website where you can create deliberative surveys, for free.

The problem

Most social-networks are "divergent", grouping us into "filter-bubbles" of like-minded people. These groups are comfortable, and the more time we spend there, the more we hear our own opinions reflected back to ourselves, and the more extreme we become in our views.

But when we leave our comfortable bubbles to make decisions for the larger society, the conflicting extreme opinions create chaos. Decision-making for our city, state, & nation becomes more and more difficult as people become further & further away from consensus.

Converj

We need a way to understand the world outside our own filter-bubble. We need a way to re-converge our isolated islands of belief, back into a single mainland society. We need a way for people to disagree, but still understand each other, and understand the facts. We need a way to plan a future together.

Converj is a forum that breaks filter-bubbles, creates consensus in diverse groups, and improves the quality of group-decisions. Converj is run by a privately-held company, operated "for benefit", seeking profit only to operate sustainably.

Reason-based voting

When opinions conflict, voting alone does not bring opinions closer together. Competitive voting can even increase partisanship. But reason-based voting helps people to learn more, both about their own ideas, and about opposing ideas, finding new common ground.

Minimizing the burden of knowledge

We do not like to waste time. So these survey tools have been designed to make it fast & easy for people to express their reasons, and to comprehend others' reasons.

Anti-abuse

Some small fraction of people will try to break, misuse, and corrupt any forum, sometimes using coordinated campaigns of abuse. A forum for all people must allow subversion to exist, but limit the impact of their abuse. These tools are designed to allow noisy special-interest-groups to speak their mind, without preventing coherent planning.

Background documents

• Group decision problems
• Civic participation key words
• Civic participation apps
• Experiment summary
• Open voter ID
• About us

Intellectual property

You may copy this site. These ideas are unpatented, straightforward applications of prior art from projects like Consider.it, Tricider, and more.

Open-source code

The code for this site is open-source, under Apache license, at:
https://github.com/converj/reasonSurvey

Legal documents

• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy

Accessibility

This website is periodically reviewed for accessibility. The goal is to support keyboard navigation, and screen-reader navigation with:

• VoiceOver on MacOS
• VoiceOver on iOS
• Talkback on Android
• ChromeVox on ChromeOS