Chile became a political hotbed in a matter of days last month. Amid the chaos, people demanded reforms to the country’s privatized pension and health-care systems, a new constitution, and punitive measures for tax dodgers and companies involved in price-fixing. But their voices need to be aggregated if they are not to be lost in the din of rallies or fragmented into thousands of tweets.

To this end, we created the experimental platform Chilecracia, using crowdsourcing methods already validated in academia. Examples include MIT’s Place Pulse (P. Salesses et al. PLoS ONE 8, e68400; 2013) and Moral Machine (E. Awad et al. Nature 563, 59–64; 2018). Chilecracia pairs policy proposals and asks: “What would you prioritize?” Within 10 days, more than 120,000 people had indicated at least one preference, amounting to more than 7 million votes. The data are helping us to compile detailed networks of policy preferences (see chilecracia.org).

Chilecracia is being updated weekly with the help of a team of policy experts. We have received requests from several countries to deploy regional, organizational and national instances of the system. Our findings add to the growing literature on such surveys (see go.nature.com/2qiwoja) and offer insight into online crowdsourced participation systems in politically active situations.