About

Converj is a website where you can create online 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 bursts filter-bubbles, encourages consensus in diverse groups, and improves the quality of group-decisions.

• 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 knowledge burden

  We do not like to waste time. So Converj is 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. A forum for all people must allow subversion to exist, but limit the impact of their abuse. Converj is designed to allow noisy special-interests to speak their mind, without interrupting coherent deliberation.

• For benefit

  Converj is run by a privately-held company, seeking profit only to operate sustainably.

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

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