“With Voxit, it is easy to reach people who would not necessarily attend a town hall meeting,” says Kirsi Hantula from Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund. “We can even reach younger people. That is a clear benefit.”
The developers and user organisations behind Voxit – which include Sitra, public sector digitalisation company DigiFinland, the Finnish open source association COSS, as well as several Finnish municipalities, regional administrations, ministries, and an umbrella organisation of 250 Finnish civil society organisations – are looking to change the way we discuss political matters online. Voxit is an open source polling platform that addresses challenges commonly found in online conversations and digital polls, like low engagement or highly polarising debates.
The hope is that Voxit will change the landscape with a rather simple concept. A facilitator opens a discussion on a specific topic and introduces a set of statements. Participants then vote on each statement, either agreeing, disagreeing or skipping them. They can also suggest new statements for others to vote for, and many do. The results are then refined into a detailed report.
“Voxit is particularly useful at the beginning of a decision-making process, when policymakers want a more detailed picture of people’s views,” says Hantula, the Leading Specialist in the Democracy Innovations program who has been leading the Democracy Technology team of Sitra, responsible for the Voxit initiative. “It shows where there is consensus and where opinions diverge. This allows decision-makers to move more quickly on issues where agreement already exists.”
The vast majority of other survey tools in the market allow only the organisers to define the questions. Voxit takes a different approach to help surface a broader, more nuanced range of views.
“In traditional survey tools, the organisation which decides about the survey questions holds the power. In Voxit, they only act as a facilitator of a discussion, but participants can introduce additional statements and topics under the main theme,” says Hantula. “This gives users significantly more agenda-setting power.”
Voxit builds on Polis, a platform developed in the United States in the early 2010s. Sitra introduced the platform in Finland a few years ago and developed it with a partner to better match European needs and regulations.
Similar initiatives and pilots have been conducted in some other European countries. In recent months, a European-wide open source Voxit community has been formed to further develop the platform, share resources, and systematically build a shared code base, largely based on work previously carried out in the Netherlands.
Through technical development, the European project is evolving into a separate fork from the original Polis platform. Community-building efforts are led by the Finnish open source association COSS. In March, they organised a hackathon in Helsinki with collaborators from eight other EU countries to speed up the initiative. The international collaboration has already highlighted lessons for adaptation, as well as the varying motivations across different national contexts.
“Some are primarily drawn to the platform’s capacity to depolarise public debate on sensitive issues; others seek to embed its use more firmly in democratic decision-making processes; and still others aim to further develop the platform for research purposes. We all stand to gain from working together,” says Hantula.
In Finland, Voxit has been developed closely with the public sector, particularly the wellbeing services counties, which are regional Finnish authorities responsible for health and social services.
While collaboration with the Finnish public sector and development has highlighted some challenges, particularly in procurement practices, the response to the open source platform has been largely positive. According to Hantula, the benefits extend beyond user experience and polling, supporting broader decision-making processes.
“Open source allows resources to be brought together from across Europe,” Hantula adds. “Especially in today’s context, transparency in decision-making processes is essential. Open source participation platforms guarantee this. They are open for scrutiny and research.”
Photo by Towfiqu Barbhuiya
