There’s plenty of evidence – from the White House on down to local households – that we live in polarized times, but you wouldn’t know it from the final accounting of results from the Bowling Green Civic Assembly earlier this year.

A partnership between the Daily News and the American Assembly at Columbia University, the civic assembly in February was an exercise in community engagement, giving local residents an opportunity to weigh in on local issues and even start conversations of their own.

Using the Polis online survey tool, the civic assembly gathered thoughts and opinions on topics ranging from local traffic to marijuana legalization. The Polis tool allows for a freewheeling discussion that could easily devolve into a split down ideological lines, but the organizers of this experiment say that didn’t happen.

“The things that people wanted to talk about were areas of agreement,” said Joe Karaganis, vice president of the American Assembly. “Things like traffic, local development, cable and broadband.”

“This platform (Polis) gives free scope to those responding, but the topics that came up were mostly consensual ones. That tells us that there’s a common sense of community.”

Maybe it should come as no surprise that statements about the need for improved traffic flow or more competitive cable rates would garner only 2 to 3 percent disagreement.

But the extent of the agreement across the 609 statements included in the exercise caught the attention of both Karaganis and Sam Ford, a Knight News innovation fellow who helped facilitate the online and in-person aspects of the civic assembly.

“There are really a small number of issues where there are big divides,” Ford said. “To me, that’s an interesting outcome. It seems that there’s actually a lot of consensus about what issues people think are important.”

The civic assembly was a groundbreaking endeavor, including the online “virtual town hall” that ran for 11 days and was then followed by a face-to-face town hall and a community workshop. Ford and Karaganis said the amount of participation in this experiment was encouraging.

“For us, this was a test to see if this approach will work,” Ford said. “Will people take part? People seemed to embrace the opportunity to contribute what’s important to them.”

That’s backed up by the final statistics on the online portion of the civic assembly. Over the 11 days, 2,026 people participated and 403 of them submitted statements on a variety of topics. On average, participants voted on 111 statements each, resulting in a whopping 225,460 votes.

“The quantity of participation exceeded everyone’s expectations,” Karaganis said. “There’s a gratification there.”

And there are tons of data to be mined in ways that can enhance Bowling Green and Warren County, according to Karaganis and Daily News Director of Media Operations Joe Imel.

“If I were a politician, I’d take a look at these topics and focus on the ones with the most agreement,” said Karaganis, who said the American Assembly may look at replicating the Bowling Green Civic Assembly in other communities. “The results we got are suggestive of community-based connections to each other. It could become an interesting experiment in depolarization. I’d like to see that aspect of it explored further. This has both civic applications and journalism applications.”

Imel, in fact, pointed out that the civic assembly was just one example of how the Daily News is using its status as a well-established news source to create opportunities to engage with the public in ways that enhance the community it serves.

“The civic assembly led right into other events we’re doing,” Imel said. “It’s a way for us to improve the quality of life in Bowling Green.

“It’s important for us to help our readers understand and take more interest in how the community operates. We were thrilled to be able to take part in it.”

Information and statistics on the civic assembly are available online at www.civic-assembly.org/bowling-green-report/.