Applications | Equality by lot

Lawson and Jenke: The solution to the ills of citizen juries is more citizen juries

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Yoram Gat

Emma Lawson and Emily Jenke, CEOs of democracyCo which ran the citizens’ jury on nuclear waste storage in South Australia, write in The Mandarin (full article accessible here):

The nuclear waste storage facility citizens’ jury of 350 people — which we convened — recently returned a verdict that didn’t neatly advance the government’s agenda. Some have since argued that citizens’ juries don’t offer a useful approach to democratic decision-making. After all, the jury voted down the government’s proposal that a nuclear waste storage facility be hosted in SA. It is widely understood that the government wanted further consideration of this issue.

However, after six days of formal deliberation and countless additional hours of reading and analysis, a large portion of the jury (66%) found that this was not a proposal the state should pursue.

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Filed under: Applications, Elections, Press, Sortition | 2 Comments »

The Canadian Citizens’ Panel on Pharmacare Reports

Posted on December 8, 2016 by Simon Threlkeld

A Citizens Panel on Pharmacare was held in Canada. From its webpage:

In October 2016, we invited 35 randomly selected Canadians to meet in Ottawa to consider whether there are better models that can improve access to prescription drugs.

Over five days, this group heard from a range of experts, examined different options, and, together, developed a clear set of recommendations for Canada’s health ministers and policy makers.

The panel’s report is here.

Note that although it says the 35 citizens are randomly selected, if you read further you can see that what they actually mean is that they were randomly selected from people who had volunteered to be on the panel. Some of the CBC news coverage of the report:

The panel’s research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. A committee of clinicians, senior public servants and health researchers from across Canada oversaw the process.

[Emily] Dukeshire [of Calgary, one of the citizen panelists,] said she was impressed with the process. Panelists were randomly selected from about 1,000 representative people who had volunteered to take part in the process to advise policy-makers on drug coverage for Canadians.

“This whole process was really amazing that we were all so different and from all across the country, and yet we went through this process together and we were able to come up with core values that we all believed. We were able to define some issues and then come up with some solutions together,” Dukeshire said.

Other speakers included doctors, nurses, pharmacists, brand name and generic manufacturers, insurers, retailers, patients, public agencies, academics and former policy-makers.

Filed under: Applications, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

Belgiorno-Nettis: “[The government] has stopped listening”

Posted on November 24, 2016 by Yoram Gat

Luca Belgiorno-Nettis, the founder of newDemocracy Foundation, which designed and oversaw the nuclear dump citizen jury process for the South Australian government, has an article in the Sydney Morning Herald in the aftermath of the jury’s decision to reject the proposed dump. Belgiorno-Nettis softly criticizes SA Premier Jay Weatherill’s newly-announced intention to have a referendum on the dump:

From the time the royal commission report was handed down earlier this year, the South Australian government has been trying to listen, very carefully, to its community.

But now it has stopped listening, even after the citizen jury concluded their deliberations. A referendum has now been floated as a way to finally determine the question; never mind the most recent lessons from the Brexit experience. The jury tried to find common ground. A referendum won’t.

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Filed under: Applications, Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | 7 Comments »

Will the Australian citizen jury process survive the nuclear dump decision?

Posted on November 13, 2016 by Yoram Gat

The SA jury on the nuclear dump proposal has handed out its report eliciting significant press coverage and a flurry of reactions. The Online Opinion reports:

Where to now, for Premier Weatherill’s nuclear dream?

On November 6th, to the surprise of all, South Australia’s Nuclear Citizens Jury came up with a report that overwhelmingly rejected the government’s plan for importing and storing high level nuclear waste. Over four days of witness hearings, and deliberations, the 350 members of the jury were tasked with producing an answer to this question:

Under what circumstances, if any, could South Australia pursue the opportunity to store and dispose of nuclear waste from other countries?

The jury’s answer:

Under no circumstances should South Australia pursue opportunity to store and dispose of nuclear waste from other countries for reasons of consent, economics, trust and safety.

But while the Online Opinion is worried about nuclear dreams, another dream is just as much in jeopardy: the dream of Citizen Juries. It seems very likely that Weatherill has promoted the CJ idea because he believed it would be useful for his political agenda, of which the nuclear dump was a part. It seems very likely that those who offered Weatherill the idea, some of whom got to run the process, implied that this would indeed be the case. It also seems likely that other elected politicians have been watching this process with some interest in order to determine to what extent CJs could be used as a tool in their own political box.

In the wake of this outcome, the academics and the political operatives and entrepreneurs would have to go back to the drawing board. They will have to work hard to explain to the politicians how they will re-engineer CJs to guarantee that such unwelcome outcomes will not re-occur.

Filed under: Applications, Elections, Juries, Press, Sortition | 11 Comments »

“A little bit manipulated”

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Yoram Gat

The Adelaide news website InDaily has a report by Bension Siebert about discontent in the ranks of South Australia’s citizens’ jury on nuclear waste storage:

Some members of the 350-person jury have told InDaily they voted for a group of witnesses to present information about nuclear waste storage but the facilitator of the process, DemocracyCo, subsequently invited additional witnesses without explicit jury consent.

DemocracyCo concedes it did add further witnesses after a voting process, but says that is “standard practise” in citizens’ juries.

Juror Brett Aylen, an architect, told InDaily: “I do feel like I’m being a little bit manipulated by the process.” He said DemocracyCo facilitators were surprised by the jury’s witness selections and wanted to “balance it up by adding in some of the more pro-nuclear witnesses”. “They seemed a bit surprised at our selections,” he said. “If they had have declared that position in advance [that more witnesses may be added] it would have been more acceptable.”

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Filed under: Applications, Juries, Press, Sortition | 5 Comments »

Graham Smith: The problem with politicians and democracy…

Posted on October 14, 2016 by Yoram Gat

I would complete the headline of Alex Sakalis’s interview with Graham Smith on openDemocracy with “… is that they are mutually exclusive” (at least if by “politicians” it is meant “elected politicians”). Smith, however, strikes a more tentative note:

Citizens’ priorities are not necessarily the same as those of their political representatives. […] What is clear is that citizens are willing and able to deliberate on complex and contested political issues. The question is whether they will be listened to by local and national political leaders. The evidence is not promising.
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Filed under: Academia, Applications, Elections, Participation, Press, Sortition | 1 Comment »

The Irish Citizens’ Assembly on abortion: democratisation or dodging responsibility?

Posted on September 12, 2016 by Brett Hennig

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This was published on Open Democracy last week: The Irish Citizens’ Assembly on abortion: democratisation or dodging responsibility?

I find it very exciting, that the Irish government is returning for their second assembly using sortition – this time without politicians. Although we’ll have to wait and see what they do with the results.

It’s due to start next month.

Filed under: Applications, Juries, Sortition | 1 Comment »

G1000 Kick Off in the UK – Cambridge, September 24th

Posted on September 5, 2016 by Brett Hennig

If Brexit proved anything, it proved that what Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels say in Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government is true. People do not vote after careful consideration of facts and options, they vote to affirm their membership of various social groups and express agreement with the opinions of those groups, which may have little or nothing to do with the issue at hand being voted upon.

As David Van Reybrouck expressed so eloquently in his article, Why elections are bad for democracy (an extract from his book Against Elections) there is something very wrong with voting and elections and there is a much better way to do democracy: select a representative random sample of ordinary people, provide them with balanced information, and let them deliberate together to find out not what people do think, but what they would think, if given the time and information together with a good deliberative process.

From 11am to 4pm on September 24th, in Cambridge at the Six Bells Pub, a group of volunteers will meet to kick-off the process of bringing Van Reybrouck’s brainchild – a G1000 – to the UK for the first time. The dream is to bring a randomly selected group of 1000 residents together for one day in early 2017, to deliberate and decide together what is best for Cambridge.

But we need your help to make it a reality. We need people to donate their time and their energy to help organise such an event. We will need fundraisers, social media ambassadors, technicians, volunteers, cooks and a whole host of other help. Can you be one of these people? If so please join us, get in touch or come along to the G1000 Kick-off in Cambridge on September 24th.

[This post is from the Sortition Foundation blog: http://www.sortitionfoundation.org/g1000_kick_off_in_the_uk_cambridge_september_24th]

Filed under: Action, Applications, Deliberation, Experiments, Initiatives, Sortition | Tagged: citizen deliberation, David Van Reybrouck, G1000, sortition | 8 Comments »

More citizen juries in Australia

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Yoram Gat

The newDemocracy foundation has recently been managing the citizen jury process in regards to the South Australia nuclear waste dump proposal. Now it has been hired to manage another citizen jury process – this time in Victoria:

Jay Weatherill has issued an “I told you so” over his oft-criticised Citizens’ Jury model, after it was adopted by the Victorian Government as it seeks to mop up in the wake of its dramatic sacking of the Geelong Council.

Sacked Geelong Mayor Darryn Lyons outside the Victorian Parliament.

The Government in April moved to dismiss the entire council – including colourful mayor and notorious former paparazzo Darryn Lyons and his deputy Bruce Harwood, the father-in-law of former Adelaide star Patrick Dangerfield – after an inquiry found it had become so dysfunctional and riven with internal conflict and a bullying culture that it could no longer govern properly.

Fresh elections won’t take place till October next year, with an administrator overseeing the region in the interim.

But Premier Daniel Andrews has announced the formation of a Citizens’ Jury to help set the parameters of an overhaul of the next council’s governance structure – to be overseen by Sydney-based newDemocracy Foundation, which selected the 50 jurors involved in this month’s Adelaide forum on the merits of a high-level nuclear waste dump.
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Filed under: Applications, Juries, Press, Sortition | Tagged: Australia, newDemocracy | 15 Comments »

Democracy In Practice’s newest project

Posted on June 19, 2016 by SimonPek

We are happy to announce the launch of our newest project focused on democratic experimentation and innovation in collaboration with the R.V. High School in Bolivia. Check out our launch video below, and stay tuned for more updates! Happy to hear any of your questions and comments.

Democracy In Practice