Glossary

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.

Citizens' Assembly Members are people selected by lottery to form a broadly representative group of the community and take part in a Citizens' Assembly. 

Assembly Members are selected by lottery to be broadly representative of a community, which means everyone has an equal chance to represent and be represented in turn. 

How does the selection process work? 

There are two stages. In a first stage, a large number of invitations (often between 10-30k) are sent out to a group of people chosen completely at random. 

Amongst everybody who responds positively to this invitation, a second lottery takes place. This time there is a process - known as stratification - to ensure that the final group broadly represents the community in terms of gender, age, geography, and socio-economic differences.

The term for this two-stage process is sortition.

Find more details how it takes place here.

We use the word ‘citizens’ intentionally. We mean the term in the broadest sense of a person living in a particular place, which can be in reference to a village, town, city, region, state, or country depending on the context, rather than in the more restrictive sense of ‘a legally recognised national of a state’. We use the word ‘citizen’ interchangeably with ‘people’ in our work. We see citizenship as an active practice.