Supportoppose

Supportoppose is a decision-support concept in which participants indicate either support or opposition to a proposal, policy, or statement. Unlike binary yes/no votes, supportoppose aims to capture directional sentiment and may allow brief rationales, intensity levels, and timestamps. It is used in online deliberation tools, civic technology platforms, and governance software to complement traditional voting and formal consultations.

The term describes a flexible pattern rather than a fixed protocol and appears across participatory design discussions. Implementations typically present two options—support and oppose—with optional fields for justification. Some systems add weights, allow multiple votes over time, or measure the strength of stance. The collected data are aggregated to show overall distributions, dominant concerns, and areas of consensus or contention, helping facilitators and decision-makers prioritize discussion topics.

Applications include legislative or policy consultations, organizational policy reviews, community planning, platform governance, and content moderation decision logs. Supportoppose can improve transparency by surfacing why people agree or disagree and by linking stances to specific arguments.

Criticisms concern strategic signaling, polarization, and unequal participation. Ambiguity in intensity, conditional support, or mixed feelings can complicate interpretation, and design choices may influence outcomes through how questions are framed or how weights are assigned.

Variant forms exist that attach scores to both positions, track changes over time, or combine supportoppose data with traditional voting. See also voting, deliberative democracy, and opinion mining.