Frequently Asked Questions

Society Speaks is a civic technology platform that uses machine learning to turn public participation into structured insight. We group participants by how they vote — not by who they are — to reveal where society genuinely agrees, where it divides, and which ideas bridge the gap. It is open source, ad-free, and free to use.

Yes. All core features are free: the Big Questions Journey, Daily Question, Daily Brief, News Transparency Dashboard, discussions, and voting. A paid Personal Briefs subscription (from £4.99/month) is available for those who want a custom daily digest from their own sources — and it funds the free civic platform.

No. You can browse discussions, read the Daily Brief, and explore the News Transparency Dashboard without an account. You need an account to save your voting progress, create discussions or programmes, or subscribe to the Daily Question by email.

Society Speaks is for anyone who wants to understand public opinion more honestly — individuals curious about where they stand, community groups and NGOs running consultations, governments and policymakers seeking civic insight, publishers and media outlets wanting to embed structured discussion, and researchers studying public opinion.

Yes. The Society Speaks platform is open source. You can find the code on our GitHub repository. We believe civic infrastructure should be transparent and auditable.

The Big Questions Journey is a guided civic experience covering the issues that define our era. It has 8 themes — climate and planet, AI and technology, economy and work, health and care, war, peace and security, democracy and institutions, society and cohesion, and education and future skills. Each theme starts with expert-curated policy statements. After voting, you see where you stand compared to others globally.

Each edition starts with at least 56 seed statements — a minimum of 7 per theme across 8 themes. Participants can also submit their own statements to any theme, so the total grows as the community contributes. The number varies slightly between country editions.

Yes. Country-specific editions are available for the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, France, Netherlands, Ireland, Canada, Singapore, Japan, and China. Each edition anchors the statements in that country's specific policy context, institutions, and current debates. A global edition is also available. The platform personalises your recommended edition based on your browser language or profile.

Yes. After voting on the existing statements in any theme, you can submit your own statement. Submitted statements are reviewed before appearing to other participants. This is how the pool of statements grows beyond the initial seed set.

Once you have voted across a theme's statements, you unlock the recap for that theme — showing how your views compare to different opinion clusters, which statements reached consensus, and where genuine divisions lie. Complete all 8 themes to see your full picture.

Yes, if you are signed in. Your votes are saved to your account so you can return and continue where you left off. Anonymous voting uses a session fingerprint — if you clear your browser data, your anonymous progress may be lost.

The Daily Question is one carefully chosen civic question published each day. You vote Agree, Disagree, or Unsure, optionally explain your reasoning in a sentence or two, and then see how others responded. Over time, this builds a longitudinal record of how public opinion evolves.

A new question is published every day. By default, the email digest delivers 5 questions per week. You can change your delivery frequency to daily or monthly in your email preferences.

Visit the Daily Question subscribe page and enter your email address. No account is required to subscribe by email. You can manage your preferences — including frequency, send day, and time — via a link in any email we send you.

Yes. You can choose weekly (default, 5 questions per digest), daily (one question per day), or monthly. You can also choose which day and time weekly digests arrive. Update your preferences via the link in any Daily Question email.

Questions are chosen for civic relevance, timeliness, and their ability to surface genuine agreement or division. They are drawn from active discussions on the platform and from current news topics.

The Daily Brief is a free, ad-free daily news digest covering 3–5 stories vetted for civic impact. It draws from 140+ sources across the political spectrum and includes a left/centre/right breakdown for each story, 'Why This Matters' context, and under-reported stories others miss. No sign-up required to read.

Stories are selected for civic relevance — how they affect democratic life, policy, or public understanding — rather than for virality or outrage potential. An AI scoring system filters for quality and civic impact. Our editorial team curates the final selection.

For each story, we show how sources across the political spectrum are covering it — what left-leaning, centre, and right-leaning outlets emphasise, and where framing differs. Political bias ratings are sourced from AllSides. This lets you see the same story from multiple angles rather than a single editorial perspective.

The Daily Brief draws from 140+ curated sources including news outlets, analysis publications, think tanks, and podcasts. You can explore all sources, organised by political leaning, on the News Transparency Dashboard.

Yes. Subscribe on the Daily Brief page. Email is optional — the Brief is always free to read on the website.

Under the Radar highlights important stories that have not received mainstream coverage. These are stories our editors and AI scoring system identify as having high civic relevance but low media attention — the kind of stories that matter but rarely make headlines.

A discussion is a structured deliberation space where participants vote on a set of statements about a specific topic. Anyone with an account can create one. Once enough people have voted, machine learning reveals consensus statements, bridge ideas, and genuine divisions.

Sign in, go to 'Start a Discussion', give it a title and description, add your seed statements (at least 3 to start), choose your visibility setting, and publish. You can invite others via link or leave it open for anyone to join.

Seed statements are the initial set of propositions participants vote on. They define the conversation space. Good seed statements are clear, singular in claim, and span a range of perspectives on the topic. Participants can also add their own statements once the discussion is running.

A programme is a collection of related discussions organised into themes and phases. Programmes are designed for structured consultation over time — citizen assemblies, policy research, community engagement, or media-led deliberation. They support multiple stewards, progress tracking, and data export.

Public: anyone can find and join. Unlisted: joinable via link only, not listed in search. Invite-only: participants must be approved or invited. Private: visible only to programme stewards.

The consensus analysis needs a minimum number of participants to produce statistically meaningful clusters — typically 7–15 participants who have voted on a meaningful proportion of statements. The exact threshold depends on the number of statements in the discussion.

We use dimensionality reduction (Principal Component Analysis) and agglomerative clustering to group participants by their voting patterns — not their demographics, stated identity, or prior beliefs. This reveals natural opinion clusters: groups of people who tend to vote similarly across a discussion.

A consensus statement receives broad agreement across all opinion clusters — including groups that disagree on other questions. It shows where society already aligns, even when people believe they are divided.

A bridge idea resonates strongly across different opinion clusters that otherwise disagree. Bridge ideas represent rare common ground and are often the most actionable insights for policymakers, journalists, and community leaders.

A divisive statement produces a strong, clear split between opinion clusters. Divisive statements are not failures — they show where genuine democratic deliberation is needed, rather than simply counting votes.

The methodology is inspired by Pol.is, developed by the Computational Democracy Project, which has been used in government deliberations in Taiwan (vTaiwan), the EU, and elsewhere. Society Speaks builds on this foundation with its own native implementation. Our code is open source and auditable.

A Personal Brief is a paid product that lets you create a custom daily digest from your own chosen sources — RSS feeds, Substacks, PDFs, newsletters, and more. AI synthesis combines coverage from multiple sources and delivers it on your schedule. It is distinct from the free Daily Brief, which is editorially curated by Society Speaks.

Plans start from £4.99/month for a Personal plan. Professional plans (£25/month) and Team plans (£300/month) are also available, with additional features including multiple briefings, review before sending, and team collaboration. All plans include a 30-day free trial and no credit card is required to start.

Personal Brief subscriptions directly fund the free civic features of Society Speaks — the Daily Brief, Daily Question, Big Questions Journey, discussions, and the News Transparency Dashboard. We are not ad-funded, so subscriber support is what keeps everything else free.

You can add any RSS feed, Substack, uploaded PDF, or web page. The AI synthesises content from all your chosen sources and delivers a coherent digest. Team plans also allow review and editing before the brief is sent.

Yes. Cancel anytime from your account settings. There are no lock-in periods. If you cancel during a trial, you will not be charged.

Yes. Society Speaks works with publishers, NGOs, governments, researchers, and media outlets globally. Organisations can embed discussions on their own websites via the Partner API, commission structured programmes for citizen consultation, and access data exports for analysis and reporting.

Publishers can embed live Society Speaks discussions directly on their articles and pages via a simple script tag. Readers vote on statements without leaving the publication, and the publisher gets structured public opinion data alongside their content. Visit the For Organisations page for details.

Yes. Programmes are designed precisely for structured, multi-stage deliberation. You can create themed discussions, invite participants, control visibility, appoint stewards, and export results. Contact us if you need help setting up a large-scale programme.

Discussion creators and programme stewards can access vote distributions, participant counts, consensus analysis results, and CSV exports of anonymised voting data. Raw personal data is never shared.

Signed-in users have their votes linked to their account so they can track their own progress. Votes are not publicly attributed to individual users by name. Anonymous voting is available via a session fingerprint that does not personally identify you. The site does not use advertising or sell personal data.

No. Society Speaks is not ad-funded. We do not show adverts, use retargeting, or sell your data to third parties. Revenue comes from Personal Brief subscriptions and organisation partnerships.

Yes. The Society Speaks codebase is open source and available on GitHub. We believe civic infrastructure should be transparent and auditable by anyone.

You can request account deletion from your account settings. This removes your personal data from our systems in accordance with GDPR and UK data protection law.