In a landmark achievement, MIT CCC and DemocracyNext have collaborated on the first-of-its-kind, tech-enhanced citizens’ assembly in Deschutes County, Oregon.
12,750 invitation letters were mailed to residents across Central Oregon. Of the respondents, 30 delegates were chosen via sortition (lottery), to be broadly representative of the area. Each of these delegates attended two weekends full of learning, deliberation, and voting.
Their task? Using their lived experience and newly acquired knowledge to come up with recommendations which would address the intransigent issue of youth homelessness in their area.
Claudia Chwalisz, Founder and CEO of DemocracyNext, explains the rationale behind this process succinctly: “The process of spending lengthy periods of time deliberating – weighing the evidence and eventually reaching consensus – is transformative in itself. People don’t just want the government to do everything for them. They want to be part of shaping decisions affecting their lives, and are ready to roll up their sleeves to get involved.”Want to hear about delegates’ experiences in their own words? Give this video from DemocracyNext a quick listen:
Why tech-enhanced?
Citizens’ assemblies consist of a series of live streamed plenary sessions, where the delegates speak publicly about their ideas and reporters often listen in. However, much of the deep work happens in small groups of 4-6 delegates paired with a trained facilitator. Such small groups offer a more intimate space for deeper discussion and idea development; however, there is little transparency as to what happens in these spaces.
For the first time, these delegates agreed to audio record their small-group conversations in order to allow researchers to better understand their deliberation process. As an early glimpse into the tech enhancements, delegates were presented with AI-generated summaries of what they discussed two weeks prior. Moreover, they were able to see what other groups discussed, a level of transparency not previously possible when facilitators would take imperfect, handwritten notes.
What’s next?
Our team is in the midst of anonymizing, diarizing (identifying who said what), and transcribing every minute of the small-group conversations. Then, CCC graduate students will dive into several key questions:
- How do ideas evolve and change throughout the deliberation process? Why do some kinds of ideas gain traction while others do not?
- How do different deliberation formats affect the final recommendations?
- What facilitation strategies were most effective in encouraging delegates to share openly and honestly?
- What makes delegates feel engaged, heard, and satisfied with the deliberation process?
Ultimately, our goal is to spread citizens’ assemblies to make them more accessible and trustworthy. By adding these technological tools, we hope to strengthen deliberative democracy by making it more inclusive, efficient, and transparent.
Click here to watch some of 15+ hours of live streamed public discussion on this topic and review the delegates’ final recommendations in-depth.
Special thanks to our partners at Healthy Democracy, DemocracyNext, OSU Cascades, and Hand-in-Hand productions for supporting this research on the ground. Additionally, this assembly would not have been possible without support from the Central Oregon Youth Action Board and tireless organizing work by the Central Oregon Civic Action Project (COCAP), a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Deschutes County, the City of Bend, the Regional Housing Council, Oregon State University – Cascades, and DemocracyNext.
