A Civic Deliberation Platform
Showra — from an old word for a consultative council — is a civic deliberation platform built for large-scale structured dialogue. It extends the world's most proven deliberative technology with a multilingual interface, anonymity-first architecture, and AI-assisted analysis that make listening at scale practical and affordable.
The Vision
Showra aims to become the tool of choice for public-opinion gathering and facilitated dialogue — used by local governments, newsrooms, universities, and civic organizations whose work depends on understanding what the public actually thinks.
Instead of publishing decontextualized social media clips, imagine a newsroom publishing a live opinion landscape on a key issue — structured, pluralistic, and auditable.
Why This Matters
Public discourse increasingly happens on platforms that reward outrage over understanding. Coordinated campaigns, brigading, and bots flood the conversation, manufacturing the appearance of consensus while offering no mechanism for synthesizing collective opinion at scale.
Showra offers an alternative: a structured, pluralistic space where diverse perspectives — including minority viewpoints — are heard and counted rather than drowned out.
Open Source & Transparency
Showra is built on Polis, an open-source project licensed under AGPLv3. The full codebase — including all extensions and modifications — is publicly available on GitHub. Any organization facing similar challenges can freely use, adapt, and build on this work.
After each conversation concludes, anonymized raw and processed data is published alongside a full report — creating an open, auditable record of how public opinion was distributed and where consensus emerged.
The Team
Built by a team spanning product development, data science, UX, and civic organizing — with deep roots in deliberative technology and civil society. Advisors include leading experts in deliberative democracy, and the Computational Democracy Project remains a close institutional collaborator.