[This post is in response to a request from a colleague for “the best thing to introduce someone to YourView”.]

The goal of the YourView project was to develop a platform for identifying collective wisdom, focusing on major public issues, aiming to remedy some of the defects of democracy.  The platform was a deliberative aggregator, i.e. it supported large-scale deliberation and its aggregated outputs reflected that deliberation.  The project was active from around 2011 to 2014, with its moment of glory being when the platform was used as part of Fairfax Media’s coverage of the 2013 Federal Election.

The YourView platform is still alive and can be explored, though there has been no real activity on the site since 2014.  There is a collection of pages and links about the YourView project.

The best theoretical overview is Cultivating Deliberation for Democracy, particularly the second half.  The “The Zone” interview by Fairfax’s Michael Short is a good read.