Brainstorm ways to visually communicate aspects of Polis

[patcon]

I'm hoping this can be a scratch space to more permanently hold ideas of suggestions for visually communicating the workings and dynamics of Polis. There's no solid timeline on this, in my understanding.

This might take the form of things like:

• an animated SVG on the website, as placeholder
• a visual onboarding experience
• an animated youtube video
• an static infographic

Things that are welcome here:

• phrases and metaphors that have helped you in communicating details of polis
• imagery
• analogies
• prior art that captures a visual style you'd be eager to see emulate
• scripts
• tools

Related: #130

[patcon]

I came across this tool, which I was hoping to use to storyboard some ideas:
https://github.com/wonderunit/storyboarder

[patcon]

One specific idea I've been turning over in my mind:

• better communicate that "voting" isn't actually voting
• compare polis visualization with well-known ecommerce pattern
  • advantage to leverage: people are quite familiar with how algorithms work for shopping carts (e.g. "People like you also looked at...")
• use colors and perspective shifts to demonstrate analogous concepts, and different POV of algos (birds' eye vs worms' eye)
• Here's how I was imagining the visual story (nevermind the script):
  1. Show a stylized e-commerce product page. Bright red shopping cart in corner.
  2. Scroll down to "People who bought this product also bought..." section. Abstract products are colored bright blue.
  3. Transform view: blue products, camera diving into center, emphasizing that you're in a little corner of the data, looking only at people behaving like you.
  4. Transform view: zoom back out and up, now looking down on a polis visualization, see that there's the blue group, and also a green and purple groups.

Use the dialogue running over the animation to emphasize that the algorithms are similar, but they work on people & perspectives, instead of simply people & purchases/products. [Not sure how best to describe this...] "People who hold this view are more likely to be found within this group...". And unlike the algo used for shopping carts, Polis gives everyone the tools and capabilities to view the whole landscape from 20,000 ft, rather than confining them to a limited view of just seeing the actions of the people like them.

[metasoarous]

BTW I decided to move this to a discussion, since it's not a technical issue in relation to the codebase.