Democracy

Citizens’ assemblies have three core phases – learning, deliberation and decision making – which set them apart from other forms of public consultation such as focus groups and opinion polling.

1. Participants are provided with detailed information – presentations and Q&A sessions – about the issue at hand from a range of experts, stakeholders, and

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For democracy to thrive, citizens don’t just have to have trust in their institutions, but also need to have trust in one another. Without spaces to encounter shared experiences, diverse perspectives and differing opinions, that trust diminishes.

The first citizens’ assembly took place in Canada in 2004. It was set up by the government of British Columbia. It discussed whether to change British Columbia’s voting system. It recommended a new system, and this was put to voters in a referendum.

“Incubation” is a term often used to describe how innovative, risk-taking experiments are protected from regime norms and have the opportunity to take root and sometimes destabilize the Regime.

A citizens’ assembly is a group of people who are brought together to learn about and discuss an issue or issues, and reach conclusions about what they think should happen.

They also facilitated regional enclave discussions (as described in the “Facilitation” section below) ahead of the deliberation to identify feasible policy strategies and co-design the questions that the deliberative poll would ask of the public.

Civic hackers began to scrape government websites (usually with the suffix gov[dot]tw) and build alternative formats for data display and interaction for the same website, hosting them at g0v.tw. These “forked” versions of government websites often ended up being more popular, leading some government ministers, like Simon Chang to begin “merging”... See more