Designing an online citizens’ assembly

A practitioner perspective

It may seem like designing the unthinkable. An online citizens’ assembly? One of the core elements of a citizens’ assembly is to create the space for people to meet face-to-face. That is where the magic of citizens’ assemblies lies. Why go online then?

Well, sometimes, unimaginable situations appear, and then you start to wonder — what if? Would it be possible to achieve high quality learning, deliberation and collective recommendations through digital tools? My answer to these questions is — yes. Certainly, it would be a different experience than in-person meetings. But it could work.

An online citizens’ assembly has not been organised before, as far as I’m aware. While certainly various forms of online deliberation have been tried, what I have in mind here is transferring online the whole process with a randomly selected group who is representative of the wider public, following the same phases of learning, deliberation, and collective recommendation formation as happens during a face-to-face citizens’ assembly.

Digital skills training phase

I would begin with at least a two week training phase to ensure that all participants know how to use the equipment and software, how to join a meeting, how to mute and unmute — all the basics. This could also be a social time for people to get to know one another, to talk about everyday things and get used to having a conversation online.

To aid people who don’t have experience using the internet, personal technical assistants could be recruited (these could be volunteers). In some cases, it might be necessary to buy appropriate equipment, such as tablets with LTE internet (like in mobile phones), so that people won’t need to have a router at home. As venue or catering costs are eliminated, it could be possible to buy good quality electronic equipment without raising overall costs.

Learning phase

There are over 40 years’ of experience with online education that we could draw upon for designing the learning phase. For example, it could consist of online expert and stakeholder presentations and reading materials. It doesn’t have to be live. People could watch or read when it suits them best. The presentations should be relatively short, around 12 minutes.

To encourage learning, facilitators could provide offline or gamified tasks, like making a list of the most interesting things that people learned or filling some entertaining charts related to the materials. Next, a facilitated study group call could allow participants to share their learnings. As a general principle, all calls should be relatively short — one hour long, maximum 1.5 hours, if participants agree. They could be organised 3–4 times a week, and spread over around two months (depending on the issue and its complexity).

Live whole-group calls could include question-and-answer sessions with experts and stakeholders, during which participants could break into small groups to discuss the material before reconvening in the plenary (this ‘breakout room’ function exists on Zoom, Jitsi and other similar platforms). These small groups could follow the same good practices that take place in person, with 7–8 people per group, plus a lead facilitator and a co-facilitator.

Deliberation

For the deliberation phase, the key is small group conversation. One possible option is that facilitators could collect insights from the small-group breakouts and share them among the other groups, ensuring that knowledge spreads evenly. Draft recommendations could be developed in the same way. All recommendations could go through the same analysis process, considering questions such as: what are the advantages and disadvantages; what are the costs; who would be responsible for implementing them; and other related trade-offs.

As people have different reading preferences and some prefer a physical copy of long documents, the draft recommendations and their supporting analysis could be printed as a booklet by the organisers and delivered to participants for personal reflection before decision making.

Collective decision making

The last stage involves finding common ground to finalise the collective recommendations. In the citizens’ assemblies I have organised in Poland, this usually happens through a mixture of discussion and voting (see details here). This phase could be moved online, by filling electronic ballots or using one of the existing group decision making tools.

Conclusion

Would I trust the results of this process? Yes, if it was well-designed and facilitated. Could it be the same as a face-to-face citizen’s assembly? No. Nevertheless, it is worth trying because the crisis situation of today, and any crisis that follows, are precisely the types of moments when the citizens’ voices need to be heard loud and clear, in a meaningful, democratic way.

Marcin Gerwin, PhD is a specialist in deliberative democracy and sustainability from Poland. He designs and co-ordinates citizens’ assemblies. He is co-managing the Center for Climate Assemblies and he is the author of “Citizens’ Assemblies: Guide to Democracy that Works”.

Are you a practitioner delivering a representative deliberative process fully or partially online? The OECD has put together this survey for practitioners about what they are doing, how, and why. Answers are publicly available from the moment they are submitted in this viewable Airtable database (except for the name, job title and email of the individual filling out the form).

This post is part of the Digital for Deliberation series. Read the other articles:

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