About PolicyCommons

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 democrative process, as well as to improve the openness and accountability of the democratic process.

PolicyCommons is being developed within the EU-funded IMPACT project. The IMPACT project is researching and developing a set of tools for facilitating online, public deliberation of policies being proposed by governmental or non-governmental organisations. Within the IMPACT project, PolicyCommons plays the role of the Argument Analysis, Tracking and Visualisation Tool (AVT).

PolicyCommons is powered by the Cohere tool developed at the Open University. Cohere is a general information management tool that allows users to visually create, connect and share ideas, as well as annotate URLs with these ideas.

Key Features

Currently, PolicyCommons provides most of the main features of Cohere. These features allow users to:

  • Annotate a URL with any number of Ideas, or vice-versa.
  • Visualize your network as it grows
  • Make connections between your Ideas, or Ideas that anyone else has made public or shared with you via a common Group
  • Use Groups to organise your Ideas and Connections by project, and to manage access-rights
  • Import your data as RSS feeds (eg. bookmarks or blog posts), to convert them to Ideas, ready for connecting
  • Use the RESTful API services to query, edit and mashup data from other tools

Open Source

PolicyCommons is an open source tool. The code, which is distributed under the LGPL licence, can be downloaded from the GitHub PolicyCommons page.

Acknowledgements

PolicyCommons is developed at the Centre for Digital Citizenship, Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds, UK. It is funded as part of the EU FP7 IMPACT project. PolicyCommons is powered by the Cohere tool developed at the Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University.

We gratefully acknowledge use of the D3 visualisation library for generating network views of debates.

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