Democratic innovations to crowdsource consensus
Digital democracy design for climate resilience: Crowdsourcing consensus, understanding division and supporting collective reflexivity
This is the doctoral research of Phoebe Quinn, which began in May 2022. The research is exploring democratic innovations designed to crowdsource consensus on contentious issues around disasters and climate change, using the digital democracy platform Polis.
Collective decision making is foundational to climate and disaster resilience. Yet communities encounter common pitfalls including: low levels of engagement; tendencies for disagreement to attract most attention while common ground is obscured; and inertia arising from complex distributions of agency and responsibility across individuals, organisations and governments.
The study piloted and evaluated two online participation processes using Polis, an open-source digital democracy platform which enables participants to respond to a prompt by submitting short, anonymous comments and voting (agree, disagree or pass) on comments from others. There is no direct reply button, reducing the conditions for interpersonal conflict while still allowing diversity of opinion to surface.
The research centres on two action research case studies in Australia where Polis was used for discussion of a climate-related issue (air travel emissions at a university, and urban heat in a local municipality). The aims in these pilot processes were to crowdsource ideas from many participants, reveal both diversity of opinion and points of consensus, and foster collective reflexivity. The research examines the extent to which these aims were realised in practice, and how this was shaped by design features (of the Polis tool and the processes for using it), context and the agency of those involved.
Beyond the case study findings, this research offers a model of democratic design developed with the intention of supporting plurality in extending toolkits for working through collective action problems. This model may be used for planning, implementing and analysing future democratic initiatives.
Read more
A social media platform that is actually good for democracy? (Pursuit, 2024)
What should we do about staff air travel emissions? Crowdsourcing consensus and understanding division within an Australian university (Paper in Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 2025)
Funders
University of Melbourne (Melbourne Climate Futures and Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry & Health Sciences) and Natural Hazards Research Australia
Supervisors
Professor Lisa Gibbs, University of Melbourne
Professor Kathryn Bowen, University of Melbourne
Professor Nicole Curato, University of Canberra
- Contact Name
- Phoebe Quinn
- phoebeq@unimelb.edu.au