Help shape the next Assembly Guide!
Our flagship guide has reached 30,000 views in two years - and now it’s time to upgrade it into the Assembly Commons
Two years ago, we published our Assembling an Assembly Guide - a practical, open-access guide to citizens’ assemblies, sortition, and deliberative processes.
Since then, the guide has been translated into Spanish, Basque, and Japanese, and we will soon be launching the French edition. It’s been viewed around 30,000 times by around 17,000 people, and has been used by civil servants, practitioners, researchers, and institutions around the world.
We’ve heard from many of you that it helped demystify assemblies, supported real-world implementation, and filled a critical gap in the field.
Now, we’re starting to think about what comes next - and we’d love your help.
Introducing: The Assembly Commons
Our next step is to grow the Assembling an Assembly Guide into The Assembly Commons - a shared, open-access knowledge hub.
We want to make it easy to implement and innovate with these democratic methods, while pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
Our vision is to create a go-to resource where anyone - from someone completely new to deliberative democracy, to experienced practitioners - can find what they need, including:
📚 Knowledge resources
Guides for different stages (starting, running, tech-enhancing, institutionalising), different scales and sectors (Assembly Light, cities & regions, museums, schools), and research that advances the field.
🛠 Data & tools
Trackers of completed and upcoming assemblies, templates and toolkits, case studies, and examples of useful documents needed when setting up an assembly.
🤝 Community learning
Ways for practitioners and researchers to share insights, build on each other’s work, and collectively push the boundaries of what’s possible.
We’d love your feedback
Around 17,000 people have used the Assembly Guide in the past two years. If you’re one of them, your experience matters enormously to us.
We’d love to hear:
What did you find most useful in the current guide?
What was missing, unclear, or hard to apply in practice?
What resources would make your work easier in future?
How could a shared “Assembly Commons” best support you?
Please take a few minutes to fill out our short feedback form below, and share it with your colleagues or networks!
Thank you for being part of this growing field and community. We’re excited about the next phase - and we hope you’ll help shape it with us.
Onward!
📡 On the radar
World Economic Forum - We Are All Decision-Makers - We are delighted to see that citizens' assemblies featured at Davos. Listen to our Founding Strategic Advisor Hélène Landemore make a compelling case about their democratic potential with Nobel Prize winning economist Sir Oliver Hart and Editor-in-Chief of Foreign Policy Magazine Ravi Agrawal.
People Powered — Impacts of Citizens’ Assemblies: A Summary of the Latest Research - A synthesis of global evidence on how citizens’ assemblies can boost political knowledge, trust and democratic participation, and influence government processes when thoughtfully designed.
Scott Warren, Democracy Notes - A sharp reminder that crisis response - “firefighting” - is necessary but insufficient without a longer-term theory for democratic renewal and structural change.
International High-Level Expert Committee on Democracy at Work - A new report arguing that meaningful workplace democracy requires both worker voice in decision making and shared ownership, not one without the other.
Ozan Varol, House of Beautiful Business - Nostalgia isn’t just a feeling; it’s being used strategically to shape narratives about the future and slow down change.
European Alternatives — Guidelines on How to Implement Future Randomly Selected Assemblies at Transnational Level - A handbook setting out principles and design choices for organising transnational citizens’ assemblies as democratic innovations beyond the nation state.
European Alternatives — Digital Assembly Cookbook - A hands-on guide to running large-scale, secure, and inclusive online citizens’ assemblies.
🗓️ Events
11 February, The Hague, The Netherlands
Hannah Terry, DemocracyNext’s Programme Coordinator, will be on a panel at Leiden University College, exploring how democratic institutions can become more innovative, inclusive, and effective in the context of increasing pressure on democratic processes and civic society.
Save the date: 12 March, 15:00-16.30 CET, online
Join us for the launch of our latest research paper detailing deliberative democracy in Africa. Written by Rorisang Lekalake and Stephen Buchanan-Clarke. Registration details to be released soon!
7-10 May, Athens, Greece
Claudia will be speaking at the World Beautiful Business Forum, the most human gathering for the more-than-human world, in various legs of the AI Democracy Marathon. DemocracyNext is proud to be a partner to the Forum. We hope to see many of you there!