🚀 Scaling sortition, deliberation & rotation
Four takeaways from 2025 and an exciting update about what’s next in Phase 2.0 of DemocracyNext!
As we look back on 2025, we see that deliberation, wherever it happens, tends to bring similar truths to the surface: people want to be heard, they want to understand one another, and they want to make decisions together with care. And when institutions create space for that, things begin to shift.
🙏 We’re grateful and inspired to be working with an amazing international community of changemakers, advocates, leaders, researchers, and ultimately, citizens. You give us hope that we can do more than lament the status quo. We can roll up our sleeves to build the kind of democratic practices and institutions we want to see.
It reminds us that another democratic future is possible.
In our last newsletter of 2025, we share four takeaways from 2025 and an exciting update about what’s next – how and why our strategy is shifting for Phase 2.0 of DemocracyNext. Watch Claudia’s end-of-year video message if you can’t wait until the end of the newsletter!
1. People gathering, listening, and shaping their communities
Throughout 2025, our three partner cities – Kerewan, Vilnius, and Esch-sur-Alzette - moved from learning about assemblies into delivery mode. Kerewan and Vilnius, with support from local practitioner organisations, designed and ran their first citizens’ assemblies this autumn. Assembly members stepped into these rooms and familiar patterns emerged: careful listening, unexpected connections, and a growing sense of shared purpose.
At the same time, in a very different environment, the Birmingham Museums Trust (BMT) citizens’ jury members have continued working closely with the Co-CEOs and team at BMT to support the implementation of the recommendations they launched publicly at the start of the year, in what was the UK’s first museum-based citizens’ jury. Over several weeks, 26 residents explored the question: What should the city’s museums be for, now and in the future?
Despite the difference in context, the atmosphere echoed what we had seen elsewhere: people leaning in, grappling with complexity, and realising how much they could shape when given the time and trust to do so.
Across cities and sectors, the insight was the same: When people have space to deliberate, they rise to the occasion.
2. Institutions listening - and changing in response
We weren’t just enthused about the quality of deliberation, but the willingness of institutions to act on the results.
In Vilnius and Kerewan, assembly recommendations are already informing internal discussions and future planning, with Esch soon to join them.
In Birmingham, the museums moved swiftly from “receiving recommendations” to implementing them: integrating the jury’s ideas into the new strategic plan, going bigger and bolder with a hugely popular Ozzy Osbourne exhibition, and co-developing a new exhibition with jurors, all directly as a result of the recommendations.
The impact of deliberation also continued to unfold across the Atlantic. A year after the Deschutes Civic Assembly concluded in Oregon, its 23 proposals on youth homelessness continue to influence local government, schools, and even state legislators. Participants themselves have remained actively engaged through COCAP (Central Oregon Civic Action Project) - attending meetings, joining media conversations, and helping guide follow-up work. ICYMI, our Bend-based colleague Josh Burgess shared detailed updates in a recent newsletter.
A shared pattern emerged across these contexts: good ideas created by assembly members do not disappear - they travel, evolve, and take root when institutions are willing to listen.
3. Designing physical and digital spaces for deliberation
As we worked closely with cities and cultural institutions this year, we observed once again how profoundly spaces shape how people think together - from the light and acoustics in a museum gallery to the arrangement of chairs in a meeting hall. These reflections enriched our paper by Gustav Kjaer Vad Nielson and James MacDonald-Nelson on the spatial qualities of deliberation and fed into conversations with partners planning future assemblies.
Another kind of space also gained prominence this year: the digital.
The launch of the Deliberation and Technology (DelibTech) Network, together with the AI & Democracy Foundation, brought practitioners, researchers, and technologists together in Brussels to examine how digital tools - including AI - can strengthen, rather than weaken, democratic practice. The conversations were principled and honest, emphasising transparency, inclusion, accessibility, and the irreplaceable role of human judgment in collective decision-making.
What struck us most was how often the concerns raised by technologists mirrored what we hear from assembly members: “Technology should help people deliberate, not replace them.”
4. Ideas grounding and growing our practice
Our written work this year captured insights that surfaced repeatedly across all these contexts. We published four major pieces:
Five dimensions of scaling democratic deliberation: With and beyond AI (Sammy McKinney and Claudia Chwalisz) - reframing scale in terms of depth, reach, and institutional impact, and identifying where AI can genuinely support deliberation.
Spaces for deliberation: Eight spatial qualities for designing deliberative assemblies (Gustav Kjaer Vad Nielson and James MacDonald Nelson) - identifying the spatial qualities that shape democratic behaviour and offering practical guidance for designing assembly environments.
From recommendations to implementation: Lessons from the permanent Paris citizens’ assembly (Claudia Chwalisz, published by the Centre for Media, Technology, and Democracy at McGill University) - examining how Paris’s permanent citizens’ assembly turned proposals into a collaboratively drafted Citizen Bill adopted by City Council.
The case for local and regional public engagement in governing Artificial Intelligence (Stefaan Verhulst and Claudia Chwalisz, co-published with The Data Tank and NYU GovLab) - making the case for community-centred governance where technological impacts are felt most directly.
Each paper captured ideas that kept resurfacing in our work - echoes from assembly rooms, partner conversations, and the lived experiences of the communities we accompanied.
5. Looking ahead
Our small but mighty organisation is now entering its second phase. During our first three years, we’ve proven that there is excitement, interest, and demand, working closely with over 30 partners including city and regional governments, academics and universities, philanthropists, policymakers, governments, politicians, civil society, museums, and cooperatives. (Read our 2024 Impact Report).
Looking ahead, we want to highlight two shifts:
In Phase 2.0 of our work, we’re widening the scope beyond citizens’ assemblies to broaden our focus on scaling the three powerful democratic practices that underpin them:
sortition (randomly selecting decision-makers)
deliberation (structured spaces where people learn together and make informed decisions), and
rotation (taking turns representing others and being represented).
We’re also investing in the pillar of our work focused on building awareness, as we continue to build capacity and institutions.
There’s more to come in 2026, so watch this space! And please get in touch if you’d like to partner, collaborate, or support our work.
Another democratic future is possible. ✨
We at DWE are very excited for your phase 2.0! You guys are an inspiration.