Deliberation,
in your pocket
A pocket tool for starting deliberation, anytime.
A lightweight Polis your AI agent can set up from a single prompt, with no servers to worry about (thanks, Cloudflare). It gathers everyone's views and maps them instantly. One click to start.
When to use it
Community decisions
Clubs, schools, neighborhoods, co-ops: "what should we focus on next year?" See the landscape of views before any vote.
Before a meeting
Surface the disagreements and the common ground in advance, so meeting time goes to what actually divides people.
Live workshops
20–50 people scan a QR code and vote; fifteen minutes later you're reading the opinion map together.
How a round works
- Prepare: pick an open question and write 8–15 "seed statements" (one idea each, something people can agree or disagree with).
- Share the link: participants vote without signing up, and can add their own statements at any time.
- Watch the map: the report updates live. Similar voters cluster together, and the system surfaces each group's most distinctive statements plus the statements every group agrees on.
- Wrap up: read the map together (consensus first, then the divides), and export the full anonymized CSV if you need it.
Seed-writing tips, group sizes, facilitation flow: see the facilitator guide.
Demo: a simulated defense-budget referendum
113 fictional legislators (pseudonyms from Taiwanese wildlife and landscapes — no real names) were simulated according to Taiwan's actual party-seat structure. The map splits 60:53 along the "dialogue vs. deterrence" fault line — yet statements about transparency, oversight, and civil resilience reach broad cross-group consensus.
The conversation is open: your votes change the map in real time. Method notes in the case write-up.
Start in one step
You can use this public demo site directly (for your own site and data, see Host your own).
Host your own
When you want your own URL and your own data, hand it to your AI assistant and it will be running on your own Cloudflare account within minutes. The free plan is enough for conversations with hundreds of participants, and your data stays in your account — fully downloadable at any time.
Hand it to your AI assistant
- No Cloudflare account yet? Sign up free at dash.cloudflare.com/sign-up (email only).
- Paste the prompt below to Claude Code, Cursor, or any coding assistant.
- It will ask you to complete one browser login to Cloudflare — the only step you do yourself.
Follow https://github.com/mashbean/pocket-polis/blob/main/AGENT.md to deploy Pocket Polis to my Cloudflare account (I will complete the wrangler login step myself), then create my first conversation via the API.
Prefer a terminal? Six commands
git clone https://github.com/mashbean/pocket-polis.git cd pocket-polis npm install npx wrangler login npm run check npm run deploy
FAQ
Really no server?
Really. "Serverless" means no machine you have to look after — no hosting to rent, no database to back up, nothing to reboot at 3am. The code runs on Cloudflare's cloud, works only when someone votes, and costs nothing at rest. The full technical discussion (including the alternatives we weighed) is in this document (zh).
Are participants identified?
No. No registration, no email; the browser keeps only a random code to prevent double counting, and neither the report nor the exports contain any identity. Note: this lightweight approach can't stop determined ballot-stuffing — it suits communities, classrooms, and workshops with basic trust. For adversarial public consultations, use official pol.is.
How many participants do I need?
Groups appear from 4 participants (each voting past the threshold); the map stabilizes above ~20. The system is designed for hundreds to low thousands.
How is this different from official pol.is?
Official pol.is is a mature large-scale platform that needs an engineering team to self-host. Pocket Polis reimplements the same clustering method from the published literature — validated against official open datasets (group counts match; Adjusted Rand Index 0.78–0.86) — in exchange for one-step, free deployment. Not affiliated with The Computational Democracy Project.
Where does the data live? Can I take it with me?
In the deployer's own Cloudflare account, each conversation isolated. The host can download the full statement list and anonymized vote records as CSV at any time, or make the export public.
Does the demo site have rules?
Yes. Conversations involving harassment, hate speech, illegal content, personal-data exposure, or coordinated manipulation may be taken down by the site operator (mashbean) — see the Code of Conduct. Self-hosted instances set their own rules.