[8] Pol.is was founded by Colin Megill, Christopher Small, and Michael Bjorkegren after the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring movements.

[5] In Taiwan, pol.is has been "one of the key parts" of vTaiwan's suite of open-source tools for its citizen engagement efforts arising out of the Sunflower Student Movement.

[12] In 2023, Megill advised OpenAI on how to facilitate deliberation at scale in a way that was more efficient that Polis, which still required significant human labor and analysis at the time.

[13] Andrew Leonard, The Financial Times, and VentureBeat describe Pol.is as a possible antidote to the divisiveness of traditional internet discourse by gamifying consensus.

"[16] Darshana Narayanan, in an op-ed in the Economist, argues that open-source machine-learning-based tools like Polis can help to bypass the influence of special interests or experts.