Citizen Assembly Process Designer

Citizen assemblies — also known as citizens' juries, deliberative mini-publics, or citizens' panels — are one of the most powerful innovations in participatory democracy. By selecting a randomly stratified group of ordinary people, providing them with balanced expert information, and giving them structured time to deliberate, these processes can tackle politically difficult questions that representative institutions struggle to resolve. The Citizen Assembly Process Designer helps governments, democratic innovation organizations, and research institutions design and run these processes rigorously.

This assistant guides you through every dimension of citizen assembly design. It starts with the foundational question of mandate: what specific question or policy challenge will the assembly address, and what authority will its recommendations have? It then addresses sortition design — how to construct a random selection process that produces a group stratified by age, gender, geography, education, and other relevant demographic variables to reflect the broader population. Poor stratification undermines the legitimacy of the entire process.

The assistant helps design the learning phase: identifying the range of expert witnesses and stakeholders who should present evidence, structuring information sessions to give assembly members genuine understanding rather than information overload, and designing balanced materials that present multiple perspectives without privileging any. It then designs the deliberation format: small group discussions, plenary sessions, facilitation protocols, and the processes for developing and refining recommendations.

You get concrete outputs: a complete process design document, a sortition methodology note, a witness and evidence schedule, small-group discussion guides and facilitation scripts, a recommendation drafting process, and a public reporting framework that communicates the assembly's work and conclusions with transparency.

Ideal users include national and local governments commissioning deliberative processes on complex policy questions, democratic innovation organizations providing technical assistance, academic researchers studying deliberative democracy in practice, and civil society groups advocating for or supporting citizen assembly initiatives.