Check out theannouncement blog postfor an in-depth explanation of the tool's ideas, along with the motivation, goals, and plans for the tool.
What is this?
This is a tool for solving controversial problems.
Its purpose is to help reason around hard decisions, and to enable that reasoning to be shared, mutually understood, and improved. It helps you lay out information in a way that is easy to digest, as well as critique and improve upon any individual piece without cluttering or disorganizing any of it.
The core idea is that you can map pieces of solutions to pieces of problems, compare the tradeoffs of each solution, and everything that you're claiming implicitly (e.g. this piece of the problem is the most important thing to solve, this piece of the solution addresses that problem) can clearly be justified and critiqued, in an off-to-the-side but easy-to-access way.
Disagreements should come down to differences in human/moral values, whereas right now they're often rooted in misunderstanding.
When such same-pagedness is QED, the ultimate dream is to enhance the tool in order to enable any individual to gain traction on or contribute to solving any problem with minutes of effort, even if the problem is a mountain. This will require features for scaling collaboration and tracking ongoing efforts.
Vision
Imagine a world where...
... you never have to leave a conversation frustrated that you aren't understood, or that you can't understand someone else.
... politicians and citizens of diverse perspectives can work together and be satisfied with decisions intended to better society.
... ANYONE has the power to get traction on an overwhelming problem.
Mission
Enable humanity to effectively solve problems through mutually understanding their own differences and reasonings.
Design Principles
Accessible
What: Free for public use, a11y, performant, mobile, open source, easy to use, i18n
Why: Solving complex problems is hard, and it needs as many great minds as possible. Diversity and perspective are critical. Accessibility is required to maximize these.
Simple over precise
What: This type of app has a ton of possible features that can easily overwhelm the user if not managed properly. Generally, features should not target academics; this is a tool for the layperson.
Why: Complexity is a huge barrier to accessibility; the learning curve to use the tool must be low. This also applies to problem-solving - quickly conveying high-level information makes the learning curve for a specific topic low.
Release Status
A release status conveys an expectation of how solid the tool is, though there will always be room for improvements and enhancements. These are the statuses:
Alpha (current): tool is usable, core features exist but are unrefined, tool may feel clunky to use, bugs are expected, no established userbase
Beta: core features are somewhat refined, tool does not feel clunky to use, bugs are expected, established userbase is forming
No label/fully-released: core features are well-refined, tool feels smooth to use, bugs are rare, established userbase exists