A Citizens’ Assembly is a group of people selected by lottery who are broadly representative of a community. They spend significant time learning and collaborating through facilitated deliberation to find common ground and form collective recommendations for policymakers, decision-makers, and the community. These Assemblies are sometimes called Citizens’ Juries, Panels, or Councils depending on their size and the country where they are taking place.

No. You do not need any experience or expertise on the topic. You will be gathering information during the assembly, and you will be able to make up your own mind about what you think are the best ways forward. Then you’ll work through a process with your fellow Assembly members to investigate options, weigh tradeoffs, and recommend which policies and programs should be prioritized – and by whom.

• A stipend equivalent to $15/hour (for a total of $450).
• Accessibility assistance. Everyone will be able to participate, no matter their needs.
  • Reimbursement of expenses incurred to participate, including transportation costs and costs for childcare or eldercare.
  • Language access for Assembly Members whose primary language is not English, and auditory/visual assistive technologies, as needed.
• A one-of-a-kind experience. This will be a unique opportunity to work with your neighbors to help tough challenges. Members of previous Assemblies have often formed friendships and continued to work together in their communities, long after the Assembly has wrapped up.

By pure chance. We asked the County for every residential address in Deschutes County. We put them in a spreadsheet, mixed them all up, and pulled out 12,000 of them at random. It’s possible that your neighbors received letters – dice can hit a roll like that – but it’s also possible that you’re the only one on your street.

A democratic lottery, also known as sortition, is a way to select people that has been around for millenia. It has made a comeback in recent years because it avoids some of the pitfalls of other methods, such as appointing hand-selected folks onto a committee. Lotteries avoid favoritism (or accusations of favoritism), and they ensure that everyone gets a chance to be part of governing ourselves.

Democratic lotteries generally follow these steps:
1) A mailing is sent to thousands of randomly selected addresses.
2) A population profile is created, looking at age, gender, and so on – using mostly Census data.
3) People reply to the mailing using a simple form that asks for only what’s needed to run the lottery: demographic info. It’s not an application or a test – no essay questions or special qualifications.
4) All those replies are placed into an open-source computer program that creates dozens of possible “Assemblies” – all of which match the population profile. These are all “counties in one room” – each include different individuals, but all of them match that same Census data for age, gender, etc.
5) There’s a public Lottery Event, where one of those potential Assemblies is chosen as the official one. Then, we contact folks, tell them the news, and work with them to make sure they can serve.

As you can see, we need to collect demographic information so that the Assembly will be able to reflect the county’s many kinds of people and range of political perspectives. Selection for the Assembly is random but also takes into account the demographic information that you share on this form. The Assembly is selected through a lottery drawing from among all respondents to invitation letters.

Many of us do not want to be politicians or other public officials, yet we should all have ways to help solve our biggest challenges. If being known publicly is the only way, then we miss out on a lot of folks’ skills and experience. Assemblies are meant to help fill that gap.

Therefore, we take your privacy very seriously. Your personal information will be known only to Healthy Democracy staff with one exception: if you are selected onto the Assembly, your first name (and only your first name) will be used during the process. All of your other personal details, contact information, and demographic information will remain confidential to Healthy Democracy, unless you give specific permission to share it. Your information is not subject to public disclosure (like FOIA requests).

Although parts of the Assembly will be live streamed, Assembly Members may choose to avoid being on camera. The public may observe the Assembly’s work quietly from a public gallery, but the Assembly does most of its work at private small group tables, and no interaction with the public or with decision makers is required. For more info, see HD’s Privacy & Transparency Policy at: healthydemocracy.org/privacy.

All selected Assembly Members commit to participate in the full process. A group of alternates will also be selected in case anyone must drop out before the first session.

Absolutely. In fact, we encourage all available members of your household, aged 16 and up, to reply. No two members from the same household will be chosen for the Assembly, but the more replies, the more representative the Assembly will be. Several response forms are enclosed, and you may make more copies. Just remember: everyone who replies must currently live at the household address, or have received an invitation letter through a social service agency.

This program is a partnership between the Central Oregon Youth Action Board, the Central Oregon Civic Action Project, the Laboratory for the American Conversation at OSU–Cascades, and two organizations that focus specifically on lottery-selected Assemblies: an Oregon-based nonprofit called Healthy Democracy and an international nonprofit called DemocracyNext. With the exception of the Youth Action Board – which is focused on youth homelessness – all the other partners are in this for one reason only: to find and carry out innovative ways that all of us can more thoroughly participate in the decisions that affect our lives. And we have never and will never take any political positions beyond promoting those tools.

Healthy Democracy is leading the design and coordination of the Assembly. They have nearly two decades of experience designing similar Assemblies in Oregon and beyond. HD is best known for the Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR), where randomly selected residents evaluate ballot measures and provide trustworthy, nonpartisan voter information for the state voters’ pamphlet. In other words: “voter info by voters, for voters.” The CIR was born in Oregon and was one of the first permanent lottery-selected institutions created anywhere in the world when it was passed into Oregon law in 2011.

The Assembly will deliver its recommendations to the Youth Action Board and to several local governments, including Deschutes County and the City of Bend. Representatives of these governments have committed to receiving the results, thoroughly considering them, and issuing a public response, and the project team is working to secure more committed recipients – governmental and nongovernmental – for the Assembly’s policy proposals.

The Assembly is funded by contributions from dozens of local individual donors and foundations – including the Ford Family Foundation, the Roundhouse Foundation, the Wade Family Foundation, and Brooks Resources. It has also received funding from national foundations interested in promoting innovative ways of making local policy decisions, including the Rockefeller Foundation, Quadrivium and Omidyar Network.

This assembly will be enhanced using various technologies with the goals of increasing the quality, transparency, and trust of the process. We are collaborating with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) as part DemocracyNext and MIT CCC’s Pop-Up Lab on Tech-Enhanced Deliberative Assemblies. Our goal is to use technology in a constructive way to enhance the quality and transparency of the assembly. We believe that technology can be used to support and improve the sense-making and deliberation leading to decision-making that takes place within the assembly. We also want to create interactive visuals and public-facing outputs anchored in the voices of assembly members to help the public and decision makers to understand how assembly members developed their recommendations. 

After a first pilot with the MIT Student Assembly in January 2024, this is the world’s first Tech-Enhanced Citizens’ Assembly for public policy making, where we will be attempting to record the entirety of the process. For the recordings, we will be using the non-profit Cortico’s platform Fora to enable privacy-protected AI-powered sensemaking and analysis of the conversation data. Cortico and MIT CCC have a unique partnership to work together on developing and deploying technology that connects people to strengthen democracy.

It is already common practice for the plenary sessions to be recorded in Citizens’ Assemblies, as these are also open to the wider public to observe. What is new is that we will additionally be recording the small-group conversations, with the consent of assembly members for the full recordings to be used purely for the purposes of research by MIT CCC and OSU Cascades Laboratory for the American Conversation. No recordings or transcripts of the small-group conversations will be shared outside of these two groups, who are only going to be able to use them for research with approval from MIT and DCU’s  Institutional Review Board. 

We also believe that assembly members will opt in to share highlights of their conversations with their fellow citizens to shed light on how they reached their conclusions. Any sharing of highlights from the small-group conversation recordings with the wider public after the assembly is over will require the additional consent of assembly members. Similar examples to how such highlights could be shared in public-facing websites include the Be Heard Durham Portal,  NYC Public Health Corps Portal, and the Real Talk For Change Portal.. 

For more information about the tech-enhanced aspects of the Deschutes Civic Assembly, please contact Claudia Chwalisz (claudia@demnext.org) and Dimitra Dimitrakopoulou (dimitrad@media.mit.edu). 

The inclusion of people with personal experience is a central point of the Assembly. Of the 12,750 invitations mentioned, only 12,500 were mailed to random residential addresses. The other 250 are being distributed to people currently experiencing homelessness — including young people — by the service organizations who work with that population daily. Members of that community will be included in the Assembly.

In addition, we’re collaborating with the Central Oregon Youth Action Board (YAB), which is a group of young people who have experienced homelessness and are now advising local government officials. The YAB will help develop content to inform the assembly and will have a seat at the table with local officials when the Assembly recommendations are presented.