PolicyCommons is a tool that displays arguments about policies as browsable debate maps. It is designed to help users make sense of the range of publicly expressed opinions about public policies.

Users can browse debate maps about public policies and follow links from the visual summaries of the arguments back to the original policy documents. Ultimately, the aim of PolicyCommons is to support greater participation in the democratic process, as well as to improve the openness and accountability of the democratic process.

PolicyCommons is currently at an ‘alpha’ stage, which means that a significant amount of development and testing needs to be done before it can be ready for general release. Furthermore, it does not currently support the Internet Explorer browser and has only been tested on Firefox 3.6+, Safari 5.1, Chrome 15+, and Opera 11+. Please remember these prototype constraints when you use the tool.

Click on the Debates tab above to begin browsing the available maps of policy-debates.