Assembly Project

One drawback with randomly-selected citizens’ assemblies is the cost. According to Involve, it costs £150,000 – £750,000 to run a citizens’ assembly in the UK, roughly $200,000 – $1 million. Perhaps if citizens’ assemblies become more common, an economies of scale effect will make the process cheaper. But for now, it’s expensive.

A cheaper alternative is a people’s assembly — just allow anyone to come! However, these aren’t guaranteed to be as representative. If they’re not advertised widely, you will likely only attract the relatively small section of the population who regularly engage in community events and local politics (the communitati as I jokingly call them).

Luckily, my experience door-knocking for a people’s assembly suggests that many people are willing to come. My experience is quite limited but it matches with what others have found. Another problem that I didn’t foresee at first is that you risk getting too many participants for your volunteers and space to cope with. You could get round this by stopping once you get enough sign-ups, in which case your assembly will overrepresent the streets where you went door-knocking.

Out of a recent discussion with a local environmental group, a hybrid alternative was suggested. I’ll call it an ORTA assembly, standing for “Open with Randomly Targeted Advertising”.

It’s an open people’s assembly. You still allow any residents to come and do some generic advertising like posters or market stalls. You also randomly select the streets where you will go door-knocking. It’s best to choose a long list of streets. Start with five, and keep doing more and more until you have enough (taking into account that some won’t turn up and others will come for other reasons).

The reason why I suggest choosing random streets rather than random addresses is because it makes a door-knocking campaign more efficient. It saves having to keep walking or driving to houses on different streets where many of the occupants aren’t even in.

Compared to other people’s assembly, this results in it being more representative without being too much extra work. You just need a list of streets, and can use a spreadsheet to order them at random.

Compared to a citizens’ assembly, it has the advantage of being cheaper to run and open to everyone. Someone with strong opinion on local conservation matters can come to an ORTA assembly on the matter. However, it isn’t as representative, partly because of those who come without being door-knocked, and because many people will come from a random but limited set of streets.

So could it be said that we ought to try an ORTA assembly?