Citizens' assembly organizers

Related Who-Hows

• Activate learning Citizens’ assemblies organizers rely on building understanding through a ‘learning journey’ (multiple rounds of informing-questioning-answering) where participants engage with pre-written materials, speakers, Q&A responses, and experiences to build group understanding. Some of this is done individually (async), some is done in group environments.
• Evaluate claims Citizens’ assemblies organizers do not currently systematically evaluate claims. Participants are often provided with critical thinking training and the ability to ask questions of experts, stakeholders and commissioning authorities. A common practice is to take questions from participants at the end of a meeting and provide answers before the next meeting.
• Navigate conflict Citizens' assemblies facilitators will monitor for the potential escalation of disagreements and proactively separate and mediate.
• Produce adaptable outputs Citizens’ assemblies organizers advise assembly members to design their recommendations so that they do not constrain the organizing authority in the future in a way that would be inconsistent with the intent of the policy recommendation. This relies on the intent being clear to those implementing and them honoring that intent with a new policy if conditions change.
• Ensure transparency Citizens’ assemblies organizers allow public observers under reasonable conditions of distance and non-involvement. Items like background documents, speaker lists, agendas, final outputs and commissioning authority response documents are usually public. Governance processes may involve independent guarantors witnessing key ‘closed room’ decisions.
• Produce implementable outputs Citizens’ assemblies organizers create opportunities for experts and commissioning authorities to review draft outputs and comment on implementability and scope. Workflows are designed to support the templated development of outputs in required forms. The commissioning authority might provide requirements or guidelines for outputs to maximize their uptake (e.g., town plans, rates, functions)
• Make verifiable Citizens’ assemblies organizers demonstrate selection processes, allow independent observation for key process details and in some cases record or document discussions for note taking or publication later on.
• Resist manipulation Citizens' assemblies organizers design processes with an understanding of where manipulation is possible and more likely, and develop mitigating strategies, such as by reinforcing the epistemic capabilities of participants before interacting with new information, developing selection algorithms with manipulation resistance, and establishing governance protocols for impartiality of key actors.
• Enable reason-giving Citizens' assemblies organizers design workflows that build social bonds between participants, before they've exchanged perspectives on the issue at hand, to help tackle cognitive biases or assumptions. They design individual reflection sessions and sometimes recommend asynchronous journaling to develop an individual's views further. They often facilitate epistemic skills-building exercises focused on identifying unconscious biases or training critical thinking, and reinforcing these exercises with reminders throughout the process. They also have a range of facilitation methods that create different settings or modes for expression, allowing participants to find a mode that suits them.
• Support collaboration Citizens’ assembly organizers routinely combine small group deliberations with plenary reporting to divide work, refine and provide feedback as a group, and then act on that feedback in small groups. For example, one very common specific challenge is the reconciliation of multiple versions of a document, created by different subgroups.
• Support participation Citizens’ assemblies organizers have a ‘concierge’ service for participants, which helps address any reservations, context setting, or hurdles that might come up (OECD, 2021), but this is difficult to scale. Online or predominantly digital processes will naturally exclude possible participants who have low levels of digital literacy or low levels of access to the necessary technology. Some processes have trialled providing in-person support to provide this tech and help operate it, but this is resource-intensive.
• Facilitate deliberation Citizens' assemblies organizers have facilitation teams that lead the assembly members through a mostly predetermined workflow, focused on ensuring the overall task and outcomes are met within the allotted time. They do their best to be impartial while helping to maximize the processes' efficacy.
• Forecast impacts Citizens’ assemblies organizers may be given draft recommendations after the penultimate day to produce analysis to help assembly members understand the possible barriers to implementation and impacts of decisions.
• Inform wider-public Citizens’ assemblies organizers provide insights into the experience through interviews with participants, asking them to reflect on the process without anticipating outcomes. The goal is to build buy-in to the legitimacy of the process without outcome affiliation biasing reactions.
• Curate context Citizens’ assemblies organizers typically work with commissioning authorities to compile background information kits that contain basic process information, background subject matter information and other relevant information. The material is usually presented in plain language with diagrams and visual explainers where possible.
• Handle challenges Citizens' assemblies organizers will have thresholds for estimating when it will not be possible for a process to meet required outcomes, or when conditions change and adaptations are required to retain process integrity, such as when a significant number of participants do not show up, skewing the representativeness and therefore legitimacy of the process.
• Maximize neutrality Citizens' assemblies organizers will hire external facilitation teams and commit to their independence through formal governance arrangements. They will allow external auditors or evaluators to review the process and monitor for bias.
• Navigate contexts Citizens' assemblies organizers will make adaptations, such as not listing names on name badges, to disrupt ethnic profiling before social bonds can be built. They might also rotate the location of the venue to balance time spent in different regions or neighbourhoods. Facilitation teams might be intentionally representative of all sides of an issue or completely distinct. The process overall would spend more time building connections and prioritize hearing from everyone before moving through the workflow.
• Integrate wider-public Citizens’ assemblies organizers will make clear distinctions between those inside the process and those outside. They develop constructive ways for the maxi public to contribute without constraining or contradicting the internal processes of high-context assembly members, such as by asking for contributions on questions, concerns, hopes and information sources rather than rushing to judgement on proposals or outputs.
• Localize participation Citizens' assemblies organizers will use human interpretation when financially feasible, otherwise rely on Google Translate for quick translation of documents. The European Commission’s Citizens’ Panels involve live human interpretation across 26 languages.
• Enumerate scenarios Citizens’ assemblies organizers will use scenarios as a way to help participants understand the logic of the issue and sometimes to help test draft proposals.
• Reach participants Citizens’ assemblies organizers commonly recruit with 2-stage democratic lottery, which involves a round of mailed invitations and then a round of stratified random selection. There is also some use of door-knocking, random phone number dialing, and other recruitment methods. In the global south, where the infrastructure that these approaches rely on can be scarce, alternative in-person methods have been used.
• Tailor designs Citizens' assembly organizers combine their experience and heuristics with the political theory and political science literature to make informed design decisions, but the evidence base is insufficient to make strong predictions. For example: stratification quotas for lotteries serve a range of key outcomes; the extent to which marginal decisions impact outcomes is unknown.
• Build process workflows Citizens' assembly organizers contextually apply deliberative principles and established micro-processes to achieve specified goals compatible with the basic purpose of an assembly process.
• Work transnationally Citizens' assembly organizers take principles from national level processes and adapt them to the challenges of facilitating across the globe.
• Scale out Citizens' assembly organizers use techniques like dividing responsibilities for entire sections of the issue into subgroups and using technology to more efficiently aggregate views to include more people directly in the deliberative process.
• Manage subsidiarity Citizens' assembly organizers operate assemblies that address the same or different aspects of the issue and then develop a principled way of reconciling the work done in the different processes, sometimes by taking a subset of representatives or by completely merging.
• Optimize run-time Citizens' assembly organizers facilitate deliberations to support the efficiency of the process, though there are differences of view as to how heavy-handed this support should be.
• Manage data Citizens' assembly organizers sometimes utilize breakout group moderators responsible for note-taking, while others use templates to generate outputs from exercises. These outputs are either retained in paper form or sometimes digitized. Transcribing and transcoding data in the process is currently labor-intensive. Automated transcription has technical challenges.
• Evaluate processes Citizens' assembly organizers primarily rely on pre- and post-process surveys for evaluation. Comparisons are typically an auditing exercise against established standards that aren't derived from empirical data.
• Gather process data Citizens' assembly organizers sometimes anonymously record and transcribe deliberations where required for the use of technology. Most use pre- and post-process participant surveying.
• Collectivize data Citizens' assembly organizers collaborate with researchers in an uncoordinated manner, often resulting in missed opportunities for data gathering, research or evaluation.
• Integrate operationally Citizens' assembly organizers negotiate with commissioning authorities to ensure recommendations are formatted in ways that can be directly considered (e.g., draft policy language, costed proposals, or structured options). They establish handoff protocols specifying who receives outputs, through what channels, and what response timeline is expected.
• Commit effectively Citizens' assembly organizers typically ask commissioners to commit to publicly responding to the final recommendations in written form. These commitments are made before the process begins, often on the invitation letters used to recruit participants.
• Aggregate perspectives Citizens’ assemblies organizers utilize small group work, which relies on moderated or self-led documenting and integration of inputs. Ultimately, voting is used to ‘end’ the conversation in place of finding consensus. These decisions are sometimes made using Likert voting and supermajority thresholds.

Related Processes / Systems