Assembling an Assembly Guide

Assembling an Assembly Guide

The Assembling an Assembly Guide is a resource for any institution, organisation, city administration, or policy maker interested in running a Citizens’ Assembly. It is also a useful tool for citizens and activists wishing to learn more about what a Citizens’ Assembly is and how it works, in order to strengthen their advocacy efforts.

This 3-stage guide will accompany you through the different steps of designing, running, and acting on the results of a Citizens’ Assembly. It draws on and points to a curated selection of the best available resources. From deciding how to choose and define an issue, to setting the budget, timeline, and which people to involve, this guide aims to make it a simple and clear process.

Prepared by DemocracyNext, a non-profit, non-partisan research and action institute founded by the people who developed the OECD Deliberative Democracy Toolbox, it embeds the OECD Good Practice Principles of running a high-quality Assembly. The guide will be continuously updated and enriched with new resources.

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 policy makers, 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.