Technology Tools

Polis is a platform for facilitating discourse on an issue designed in a way to help overcome disagreements and find consensus by mapping out the positions of different groups and finding common ground as well as the main areas of difference. Users go through and agree or disagree with a series of statements, with the ability to submit their own statements afterwards for others to agree or disagree with. The platform then uses artificial intelligence to analyze users and organize them into several main groups based on their responses, and identifies the questions on which there was the most agreement or disagreement. Polis is ideal for governments or civic organizations looking to facilitate discussion and gather information about citizens' views on a policy or issue is a constructive way. It has also been used as a precursor to in-person policy discussions by allowing facilitators beforehand to identify the main groups and factions around an issue, and the main areas of agreement and disagreement. The tool is easy to setup and free for anyone to use at https://pol.is.

Your Priorities is a tool for citizen engagement designed to gather feedback on a variety of different topics. It allows users to post and vote on different ideas, and can be used in a variety of ways from identifying problems for the government to fix, to brainstorming ideas for new policies and initiatives to implement. The tool can be used by a government, political party, or civil society organization to gather citizen feedback and facilitate discussion and deliberation on policy issues.

Clean Insights is a tool designed to gather analytics for your website while prioritizing privacy. Standard analytics tool gather large amounts of information, which can be useful, but can also compromise the privacy of the users viewing your website. Clean Insights provides the advantages of analytics to understand usage patterns and user behavior on your website without compromising the anonymity of users. This tool is recommended for activists creating websites on sensitive subjects, or topics that users might not want to be seen browsing, particularly in closed society contexts.

Block Party is a social media safety app designed for the realities of online harassment. The app allows people who regularly experience online harassment to safely engage in public conversations on social media. With Block Party, users are in control of what they want to see on Twitter. Block Party is compatible with every language and utilizes lock out and blocking features to ensure your Twitter feed is as curated at your would like. 

Canva is a graphic design tool that enables users to drag-and-drop feature and layouts to easily design beautiful visual content and infographics.

The #think10 safety planning tool provides women in politics guidance on how to enhance their personal security by combining scores from a self-assessment questionnaire and the country score from NDI’s new Women’s Political Participation Risk Index. The WPPRI calculates the risk to politically active women in 172 countries. In using the tool, women in politics can develop a safety plan relevant to their personal and professional profile, and in their political context. Each country’s ranking in the WPPRI is built from three indicators: the level of women’s political participation at the national level; the state of democracy in each country; and the likelihood of violence that women in that country face. NDI has based these indicators on data gained from the Inter-Parliamentary Union, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Georgetown University’s Institute of Women Peace and Security.

Critical Mention is a media monitoring and media contact monitoring tool. Users have access to television, radio, print media, podcasts, online news, and social media. While the tool is in English, it draws from news sources in over 90 languages. Dashboards tracking media can be tailored to the user, and Critical Mention maintains good customer support with trainings, a help desk, and a willingness to work with clients to integrate new sources. The tool is cloud-based and works especially well with traditional media sources. 

The world’s leading internet search giant, Google, also offers a communication and collaboration tool, which was initially designed for teams and business environments. Google Chat provides direct messaging and group conversations. Like Slack, the tool is increasingly being designed for teams so it has more built-in collaboration tools (like the spaces feature, which allows teams to create and assign tasks, create threaded conversations, and share files in a central place) in addition to chatting than other secure messaging apps on this list. Google Chat can be accessed through its own website, Gmail, or mobile app for each platform. The tool has a free basic subscription tier and $6/month/person for the Business Starter package.

Bitly is a tool which shortens URLs, creates QR codes, and can generate link-in-bios. The platform allows users to track engagement, including clicks and shares. Bitly even tracks what it calls “organic shares,” when other users create shortened urls of your links, for example to cite your article on Twitter. Activity around your links can be analyzed by department, channel, brand, user, or location, down to city-level. The platform can manage any number of links and users can create tags to organize links. Bitly is highly customizable, with a link personalization feature and a service in which the company will assist users in creating new API integrations. Bitly allows users to build short UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules, the Google Analytics codes that can be attached to URLs to track data for digital campaigns) to track your campaigns without the difficulty of extremely long links.

Airtable is a spreadsheet platform with database functionalities that allows users to create visualizations, processes, and integrations for custom applications.