Linn Davis is Program Director at Healthy Democracy,, where he leads civic assembly design and innovation. He has managed the Citizens’ Initiative Review and co-designed more than a dozen assemblies in the U.S. and abroad. Davis holds a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning from Portland State University.
MORE ON THEIR WORK The work of Healthy Democracy was featured in the December 2024 issue of The New Yorker, “What Could Citizens’ Assemblies Do For American Politics?”Listen to an interview with the author by Roger Berkowitz of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, “On Citizen Assemblies with Nick Romeo.”
I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It's a big question, which is why I borrow it—and also why I over-explain it the way that I'm explaining it now.
Before I ask, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. It's the biggest lead-up ever for a question. The question is: Where do you come from?
Yeah, I can see why you say that.
Let's see. The classic way to answer it: I was born and raised mostly here in Oregon, in the northwestern part of the state, but lived a little bit in Hawaii and California as a kid. I went to college in Iowa and lived on the East Coast and abroad for a bit. Certain parts of my formative years were elsewhere.
Recently, I just got back from a backpacking trip, so I've been thinking about the forest a lot. I grew up out in the forest, so I feel like I have a lot of affinity with the forest and different places.
Where do I come from? I suppose you could answer that philosophically. I feel like I've discovered that. It took me a few decades to figure that out.
I just turned 40, so I'm having thoughts about this in terms of decades as well. I feel like I've figured out that I came from a place of trying to facilitate good conditions—for decision-making to happen, or for a better society to happen—more so than being a direct advocate myself, which I've tried being a few times. I don't think I'm very successful at that.
I don't think that's my best niche, but I aim to create space for other people to discover how to be active in our society together.
You talked about the forest. Can you tell me more about growing up in the forest or near the forest?
I grew up out on a piece of land—about 60-some acres, just south of the area. It was great. It was a wonderful playground.
I feel like every kid should have the opportunity, even living in the city, to have some kind of open space on a regular basis, or one of those free-form play areas, or something like that. That was what this was. Lots of playing in the mud.
Lots of hedge clippers to cut little rabbit burrows through the blackberry thickets, like we have here in Western Oregon. Lots of building things out of random stuff. Hopefully, I got my tetanus shot at some point, because I was constantly injured and scraped up in one way or another.
It was great.
Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you grew up? As a kid, what did you want to be?
I thought I wanted to be an environmental scientist or something, because I grew up out there in the woods so much. Then I realized science is not quite where my head is at—although I really appreciate a good science podcast, etc.
But then I thought—I don’t know where I went from there—but eventually I landed on journalism. That’s what I thought I wanted to be, as of high school and into college, maybe through college, although I was starting to consider different things. Then I bounced all over the place in my 20s and ended up here in my 30s.
I'm curious about growing up in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest—what that means. I grew up in the suburbs of Western New York. I know that has a particular meaning for me. What does it mean for you to be from Oregon and from the Pacific Northwest?
Honestly, I don't even think of it. I don't know that I think of it that way that much, actually. There are things to like everywhere.
I think I'm often attracted to places that are a little bit more overlooked, actually, than the Pacific Northwest. I like the more overlooked places in this part of the world—especially the eastern side of Oregon and Washington. It's become a big interest recently, or farther south in Oregon, etc.
Here in Portland, where I live, I love it—but maybe not for the reasons people might know about it from Portlandia or the New York Times travel section.
I lived in Portland for a little bit. What do you love about Portland?
I love the unpaved alleys. We've got a vast selection of great unpaved alleys throughout this city. There are some unpaved streets too, which can be an equity issue farther east in the city, that’s for sure. But the alleys aren't really doing anybody any harm, I don't think.
They're just this fun, wild little place. You feel like you're out in the country. You pick lots of berries along the side. You wander in these.
The only place I could afford to buy a house on a nonprofit salary a number of years ago was near—on the edge of an industrial area or really far out. I found this place that was right on the edge of a train yard.
I love the train yard. I'm a five-year-old-level geek about trains. I don't know anything, but I love them.Great. I love being next to the train yard. I just go out there sometimes and sit on the concrete blocks. It feels almost like being on the edge of a natural area, which feels so weird because it's the most industrial place you can probably be—but it feels so open.
I've noticed in preparing for this, you have an urban planning background, right? There are alleys here in Hudson, and I'm fixated on the alleys in Hudson, too. What's the allure for you about unpaved alleys, as an extra dimension?
Yeah. I had this great urban planning prof who really was a big fan of what he called “unplanned funk.” He was like, yeah, I know we're in a planning school here, but the coolest thing about every city is always the things that the planners don't do—the things that are unpredicted.
What you need to do, in kind of an opposite way—and I think this applies beyond urban planning, in virtually everything—is to make sure to plan to leave unplanned spaces. But not plan too much. Just make sure that not everything is controlled and locked down.
This applies directly to our work today, as well. It’s the unplanned spaces in our work—talking about time—that are probably the most productive and the best at getting toward agreement and all that kind of thing.
It's not actually the fancy things that we've organized—these interlocking small groups or whatever. Yeah, that's cool, but actually the work is probably happening on a lunch break somewhere.
Yeah. So to catch us up, tell us where you are now and what your work is, for our listeners.
Yeah. I live in Portland, Oregon, and I work—and have for about nine years—for a little organization called Healthy Democracy.
We're a nonpartisan nonprofit, and we do civic assemblies in different parts of the U.S., and occasionally consult on things abroad. We started out—we're best known for something called the Citizens’ Initiative Review, which is a specific kind of civic assembly where we gather folks from around a state or a city to review ballot measures—usually initiatives, but sometimes referenda—and produce a statement. Or the assembly would produce a statement of voter information for the voters’ pamphlet.
Yeah, that works really well. It's heavily studied—maybe the most studied single process still in the deliberative democracy space. But it's also very specific.
At a certain point, we realized, hey, there's not a lot of activity happening on the just local government, kind of bread-and-butter civic assembly front in the U.S. And we also learned some, I think, unique things from the particularly difficult political environment of the CIR—and these campaigns funded by tens of millions of dollars, sort of breathing down, just looking over your shoulder at all times.
And so I think we've now moved into a little bit of a broader space, but still doing civic assemblies in different contexts—with some dreams to get back into the initiative system and reforms for that part of the world in a more systemic way.
Yeah. For people who are new to this sort of part of the world, what are we talking about when we talk about civic assemblies? And how do you introduce the concept to people?
Yeah. It's kind of like jury service, but for policy issues. It's everyday people from all walks of life, drawn randomly from the public, in one room, working on something really in-depth—paid for their time.
Usually we're talking really in-depth, like 30, 40, 50, 100, 120 hours. And uniquely, with a lot of gravity and often power to their work—because of the legitimacy they have with the public, given how they’re chosen and the publicity around the event.
The structure of the process is built on decades of research. We’re trying to create a space grounded in collaborative architecture rather than debate-oriented architecture—that’s a defining feature, and it filters up throughout the rest of the process.
Another key thing is the power we’re trying to instill in the assembly throughout the process itself—not just in its results. You are what you eat—the assembly needs to be as democratic internally as possible, in contrast to the semi-authoritarian style of traditional facilitation, even in deliberative spaces.
Those are some of the differentiating factors I often mention. The thing that catches people right away, of course, is the selection process—that it’s random and representative of the public across many demographic factors at once.
I end up emphasizing the process itself, because it sometimes gets overlooked. People think, “Once you get folks in the room, it’s just like a committee, right?” No—actually, it’s the opposite, in several important ways, from what we traditionally know about our political infrastructure.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we met at the—I think—I always call it a summer school, but I don't know why. It was like two days at Bard that the Hannah Arendt Center put together. I didn't know at the time that I was really in the room with—sort of—the pioneering practitioners of this form. I mean, does that feel like a fair assessment? And you were one of them.
And, excuse me, as somebody who's not in this space, who's just a resident of a small town that's sort of divided and struggles to make decisions, it was apparent to me right off the bat how special it was. I really—and I joke that if it were a circus, I’d want to run away with it. You know what I mean? It's so beautiful.
And you talk about a couple of pieces of it that I wanted to sort of focus on. One is the difference between the argument–debate style that we're kind of in now, versus the more collaborative context this creates for decision-making—and how novel that is. I mean, I certainly... can you say more about that difference and the value it brings? Because it is really radical.
And I think it's important to mention, even though this space has become very popular over the last decade or decade and a half, that essentially none of this stuff is new. We're putting it together—hopefully—in new ways and improving it iteratively all the time.
But the idea of creating a political infrastructure that is collaborative at its base? That goes back who knows how many millennia. Different people have tried different versions of this in lots of ways. It got a big boost in the ’60s and ’70s, but it also existed—just speaking about the United States—going back to Indigenous customs, going back to the customs of what we might now call conservative churches in New England.
So it's not necessarily politically tied to other issues, and it has certainly existed all over the world. It's important to mention—we’re building on the shoulders of a thousand giants.
And I think it’s interesting—arguably, it makes sense—that our political architecture developed the way it did. It came out of a world of autocracy and deeply hierarchical systems, like feudalism in Europe. And here, what was created was radically different from that. There’s no question about that.
But in a way, it didn’t go all the way. It missed the thinking that humans might be guided by their better angels. All that writing around checks and balances—so much of it is about building a system that can work even when we're acting on our worst instincts, and still not fall apart or descend into chaos. And, to be fair, yeah—it does that better than previous systems.
But there are further steps. And by no means are we at a final step. There is no final step. It should always be developing. And maybe the next step down is: okay, let’s imagine that we can bank on our better angels. And then ask: what would that look like? This also relates to something people often ask—has this gotten much harder since 2016? With the rise in divisive elections and polarization?
And the answer is: no, not really. It hasn’t changed that much. When people are in a single room with a bunch of other individuals, human behavior shows that we really want to work with each other. We’re social animals. And sometimes it goes too far in the other direction—we want to play nice to the point that we avoid conflict altogether.
That’s probably our biggest challenge. It's not that people go at each other too harshly—it's that people don't engage in conflict enough. But I think that says something good about the architecture. We’ve created the opposite problem for ourselves. And I think that's the right problem to have.
It’s still the right approach: to create an environment where collaboration is expected, and then to build into that space opportunities for generative conflict.
Because what we have in the rest of our political system is the opposite: a system built on a basis of conflict, with a few small spaces shoehorned in for collaboration—usually in back rooms, cafeterias, whatever. That’s clearly not working. And it’s clearly the opposite of what we should be doing.
So can you just sort of paint a picture of how it works, and who's in the room, and how it's facilitated?
Yeah, so typically—I'm—and these processes can take many different forms, and I think there's a lot of experimentation to be had always here. But our processes generally have two kind of main spaces—three main spaces, let's say.
There's a panel at the front of the, or a U-shaped table at the front of the room, usually sort of circular, where the plenary work happens, where the whole assembly is together.
And this is, by the way, only possible for an assembly of maybe 20 to 50. Let's say you get above that, and then we probably have to deal with some other kinds of arrangements. Although, you know, I don't know—get a big enough room and could have a really big semicircle.
But in any case, you've got that sort of space up there, and the sort of—the part of the U that's not connected is often where the lead facilitators sit—or we call them moderators—and any speakers will often sit up there at a table, or sometimes delegates who are presenting to their other delegates. That's what we call folks who are participating in these processes.
And then there's a separate space—we like to have it even in the same room, actually, so that we can flip back and forth between spaces and get more creative, and also respond to the assembly more dynamically. But sometimes it has to be in a separate room or separate breakouts, and that's small group tables.
We generally like between five and seven folks per table as kind of a baseline, but it can go more and less than that. In fact, it should. We do things in pairs frequently, in threes, fours, and often they're iterative groups that combine or mesh later on in the process.
It'll get more—what looks like chaotic—more organic, better word. And sometimes much bigger groups, but groups combining—groups of 10 even—groups like that that may have to be split off, have their own space, their own projector and laptop, and that kind of thing.
So there's kind of this work area that's split between these small groups. And then there's a public gallery. We think it's important to protect the privacy of folks who may not want to be public officials. That's a barrier to entry in decision-making currently in most of our systems.
But we think it's also important for the public and folks who may be advocates on the topic, et cetera, to have a place to watch the whole thing go down—media as well. And so public gallery—it's open all the time, regardless of what's happening. Although when folks are in small groups, those aren't miked. When the assembly's in the plenary, then that is miked. And then a livestream as well, but not showing folks' faces on the assembly unless they want to be shown.
Yeah. And why the U? Is there significance to the U?
Yeah, I think we've gone back and forth on this a lot because it's kind of a traditional setup. It looks like a dais, and it's kind of supposed to. In a way, it's supposed to give gravity to the assembly as this decision-making body that we at least treat as if they were legislators, even if they're just advisory.
It's a very important kind of philosophical point to our work. We support them. We serve them. They don't serve us.
And so it gives that kind of impression, I think, physically, which I think is important. And I think right now we think it's more important than some of the cons to that architecture—for want of—which is that it looks kind of traditional, and it may look a little bit intimidating, and it may look rather just kind of like the existing things that we know and we might not like.
And if we're trying to demonstrate something different, wouldn't we want something that looks different? And that, I think, is a powerful argument.
Certainly there are great examples of folks doing it entirely in small groups, where the plenary happens in small groups. Every small group table has a mic, and they're interacting with each other—but in small groups.
That creates sort of physical problems with people bending themselves around, doing gymnastics just to look at each other. That's hard. I think it also maybe over-emphasizes the small group and doesn't diversify the room quite enough if you're just stuck in groups a lot.
I think the different kinds of field—people react—and we don't know how people react, but there are biases to literally everything. And there is no perfect way.
So the best we think we can do is to mix it up as much as possible—apply that to everything, including the room. So I think that's important. I've seen things—people talk about not having tables—and that being a philosophical choice. It's a barrier between people.
We sometimes use the example early on that, whereas the current way of looking at problems is that we're seated on opposite sides of a table, talking at each other, instead, in this process, we're meant to sit on the same side of the philosophical table, with the problem in the center of the table, all looking at it. It's a classic mediation sort of example.
But I think all of these—whether the small group round table, the U, the circle, the whatever—they're all getting at that idea still.
I really like that choice. I hadn't considered that at all. And I wonder if you might talk more about—you said that you work in service of the—do you call them delegates? Was that the word that you used?
We call them delegates now.
Yeah. And so, can you help maybe just talk more about—because it is, I mean, you are putting them in a position. I remember when I talked to Peter MacLeod, he talks beautifully about—the spirit of publicness that's sort of in us, that we call on in a way, that the civic assembly calls on, that when we're organized in that way, we're asked to make a decision on this part of ourselves that's part of something bigger.
And it reminded me of that—when you talked about the U—that you're putting people in this position that would more traditionally be held by the legislator or the elected. Is that fair?
Yeah. In that kind of context, it's kind of context-triggering in a way, or something like that. Yeah. It's this fine balance, because we don't want to recreate the problems—either societal or sort of political—that, I mean, of course, every space does to some extent. We want to mitigate some of the things that we feel like are the worst.
However, yeah, I think the U continues to work for us. And in those certain contexts, I think one of the key things is that really in any of these processes, whether it's 20 people or it's 200 people, most of the actual democracy of this process is happening in small groups of various sizes. It's not happening in the plenary.
The plenary is a place to come back, to gather information, to ask some key questions, to get all on the same page, to make big process decisions, or to make some final sort of statements about things just before a decision point. But it's not where the key negotiation is happening, where the creative new ideas are coming about for the most part.
And so, yeah—and it's not where the social empathy is being built either, which these processes depend so heavily on.
And that's where the kind of little, you know, marginal spaces are so important. Because it's not just about getting in and doing work on policy. It's about caring about your fellow human beings, because that allows you to then get down deeper than the topic—down into what is motivating people, or what the core issues might be—and find those third-way solutions, all that kind of stuff.
There's this great—I don't remember the details of this—but there's this researcher who had this great way of kind of summarizing the trajectory of empathy-building throughout an assembly.
And he talked about how it started—people come in, don't know anything else. They're often talking about their own experiences, which is great. And the lived experience is equally important to everything else that might come into an assembly, especially because you've got a representative sample—in a very rare instance there.
But then folks start to migrate away from that and start to bring in things that they're hearing. “Hey, I heard from so-and-so yesterday in that prison,” or, “I heard from Bob in group two. That's interesting. That relates to whatever.”
And then the next step is to bring in things from a little bit farther afield—“My family, you know, my sister had such-and-such an experience two years ago.” And those kinds of things are a little mixed.
But the real end goal—it takes several days to get to, I think almost always—is, “I can imagine a person who might have such-and-such experience, maybe in the future, maybe that even hasn’t happened yet. And we need to think about them when we're creating this policy recommendation.”
That is the gold. Absolute gold. And that doesn't get built through mechanisms of process exclusively. That also gets built through just the humanity of a group being together.
Yeah, that's so beautiful. What do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in it for you?
The joy is definitely in the folks in the room. I mean, there is a joy to working with colleagues on a new design. There's definitely a design sort of pleasure to it for me.
But no, the emotional part is folks in the room—and both in the process itself and sort of discovering new things about what's happening, what the group is doing, or what's unexpected.
And also at the end, especially. I mean, there are some great videos of the final reflections of the delegates sitting around at the very end, talking about what it means to them, how important it has been, and what friends they've made.
It's an open space. And we've never said, “Oh, please say your thank-yous,” or, “Say what you feel about your fellow delegates.” No. It's a “say whatever you'd like” to each other and the public. It's literally whatever.
But universally, it is not a grandstanding space. I've never seen it become that. Only a sort of appreciation space, naturally—which is the best. And it always makes me tear up.
Yeah. Why do you think that is?
I mean, I think it goes back to that—the importance beyond any of the mechanical things—of the human aspect. I mean, people want to belong to things and be with other humans. We know that.
But it's also different to be working on what feels like an important project with people that you didn't expect to be able to work with. I mean, that's a great satisfaction.
I know I get satisfaction from that kind of thing. I get satisfaction from just watching it happen. So it must be wonderful to be a part of—and for it to be so unexpected. I mean, people come in... I mean, certainly unexpected for me.
I’d say the first one of these I did was in 2016 here in Oregon, as a statewide ballot measure around corporate tax reform. Super—like a super controversial issue. Involved a lot about education funding, but also super technical too.
And I wasn't sure. I was like, you know, this group seems to be doing something interesting. I come out of planning school and was kind of a little—I don't know—not very excited about where I felt like public engagement was in the planning world. And this wasn’t—we weren’t doing anything public planning at the time, anything urban planning-related at the time.
But I thought, oh, this group is doing something interesting. Let’s see what it looks like. And yeah, first of all—impressed. You know, people did a great job handling this very complex measure.
But more importantly than that, I remember on the first day, there were two people. There’s a bartender from Portland—tattoos up one arm, down the other—like, I think, purple hair, I forget. And, you know, pretty left-wing views, and straight out with them right at the beginning. Not necessarily questions as questions, but more as statements.
Likewise, there’s this guy—same sort of deal—but he's from a small town in southern Oregon. Khaki pants and a white polo shirt every single one of the four days that we’re in the assembly. And came out as well—statements, not questions.
I was like, oh, here we go. Classic. Let’s just see how this goes over the next four days. This is just going to break down, and everybody’s going to get on one side or the other. And here we go, you know.
And not only did that not happen, but by day four, they were the two best friends, probably on the whole panel. And they were working together in small groups, trying to figure out what the best quality information was—in this case, to send to voters.
And yeah, you know, came out of it as friends, as far as I know. And, you know, I was—I was like, totally blown away. I was like, well, if that’s not going to do it—I mean, that’s, you know—I can do anything.
Yeah. So I’m curious to hear you talk about where it is in the USA. Like, I know that I try to spread the word here in Hudson, and there’s this tension between wanting people to acknowledge it as something that’s new and different and offers a different way of doing things. But that makes people uncomfortable. So there’s a need to demonstrate that it’s really proven and right—and that this is something we’re familiar with—but also that it’s really good at very difficult problems. And can you talk a little bit more about—what’s the use case here? What’s the best application of this space?
Yeah, I think it’s—it’s often first used—this is the way I often say it now—on the most difficult issues. But I’m not sure that’s the best use, necessarily. I don’t know exactly what the best use is. It’s evolving all the time. The best use may be actually on the more mundane stuff, on a continuous basis. That might be an even better use.
And there are certain cases where I think there are really contentious issues where the civic assembly may not be it—where there needs to be something that’s a little bit higher level, or something that happens first. There needs to be some constructive kind of—something that’s more sort of focused on the human side. Something that’s arts-and-culture-related, or something that’s, you know, more public, or whatever.
I mean, there’s lots of different things that need to piece together into a democratic ecosystem. And this is just one small piece. It’s also one piece that is emphatically not a single product. We don’t think it should be a product at all. But it should not be a single thing—even. It’s not a single thing. It’s a thing that we’re now using this one term to describe, but it comes in so many different forms. The pieces are put together in so many different ways.
I think what’s more important is that the values are there. That the values in terms of the power paradigm being shifted toward everyday people and away from the people running the thing itself—or the people who are traditionally in positions of power receiving the recommendations.
That the architecture is there. That representativeness is there. That trying to focus on drawing people out of the woodwork—the 90—who knows how much percent, 99% maybe—of folks who don’t participate very much in most communities in politics, except for maybe voting every couple of years.
That is the vast majority of people in this country.
And it’s our lack of feeling of ownership—and lack of actual ownership—over public policy that I think drives so much of the ability for authoritarianism to feel enticing. And for dysfunction. And for people to gain power who are not actually the folks who are best at governing, and so on.
So we need—we need ownership, not involvement. I think that needs to drive whatever the things are that we’re doing. For me right now, this feels like an essential, sort of big piece that is missing.
But if this kind of thing—a lottery-selected and deliberative space—were present throughout the decision-making architecture, in small and big and temporary and permanent ways, then I would be focused on something totally different. Because there would be some other gap, no doubt, that would still align with those values.
Yeah. I really appreciate the—the—the completely—it's the corrective. That it’s not really this one-time difficult-question thing. I mean, I know that—I know Cambridge is thinking about doing a permanent assembly, right? I mean, I don’t know if they’ve actually instituted that, but that it's become—and people talk about it as the fourth branch. That there’d be like the people’s branch. Have you heard that? That there’s a way that it would be—it would become a permanent part of local government?
Oh, is that the latest iteration? I didn’t know that, actually. I talked to them at a point where they were thinking about just giving council the power to convene one temporary assembly each year. But if they’re thinking about some permanent architecture, that’s even better.
Oh. Well, I think that’s what I was interpreting—that there would be an annual residents’ assembly. Seemed permanent enough to me. I hope I didn’t misrepresent it.
Yeah, no. Fair enough. I mean, it would certainly be the first city council in the United States to put anything like that into permanence. Just, you know, I think compared to what we feel like is possible, and what some places in other parts of the world are doing, it feels like the sort of the first easiest step. You use council as the sort of agenda-setting body, put in this mandate—don’t set a lot of the terms—those will have to be developed, rules and sort of around it, later.
I think that's a totally legit place to start, and certainly nobody's gotten there yet. So, cheers to them. But I think then the next level is putting the governance and agenda-setting power likewise into permanent lottery-selected bodies.
And that’s—then we're getting into something that feels more like a self-contained, self-determinative sort of system with its own kind of independence.
Can you spell that out for me? I feel like I'm not grasping the distinction you're making—that you're talking about agenda and governance. Can you?
Yeah, I'll do it, actually, by using one of our sort of things that we've tried to get funded for forever. And it's kind of our, you know, pie-in-the-sky idea.
I should have just asked you: what's your vision? This is the question—what is your vision for civic assembly moving forward?
This is just one of the many crazy—in a good way—ideas, I think.
But we, since we had this sort of background in the initiative system, we've long thought about what could be the other reforms to direct democracy systems. They come from this arguably very democratic place in the early 20th century—a way to bypass corrupt legislatures and give the people direct access to policymaking power. And there's a reason why they're still so popular.
Eighty-plus percent support for the initiative process in most states where it exists, even though they're arguably one of the most corrupt systems in our democracy—hugely flooded with money on all sides, for and against these ballot measures.
But it is sort of the only place where, as a voter, you get direct—it is the only place where you get the possibility to make a direct, albeit very small, decision-making point on a policy position—on something that affects you at some point in your life.
I mean, think how rare that is—otherwise basically nonexistent for virtually all of us. Which, by the way, that is the core problem that our democracy faces.
But could this be used as sort of a mechanism to start to put chinks in that hold on power—away from the public, anyway?
So our idea is to create—this is borrowing from work by Terry Berishas in Vermont, and from work in Belgium and elsewhere as well—Madrid.
And the idea is to sort of create a cyclical process with a permanent governance body composed entirely not of former electeds or, you know, elder statespeople, but rather of former lottery-selected folks from previous assemblies exclusively, which would have power to hire and fire the people like us—who are sort of their expert technical design consultants—as well as to set other terms and rules related to the process itself.
And every two years, there would be an agenda assembly that would be separate from that governance assembly. I think that's important, although sometimes those things have been mixed in the past.
That agenda assembly would do agenda-setting across all the policy issues throughout a particular jurisdiction—let's say a state. What is the legislature missing?
Get inputs from the public in a variety of, perhaps, online ways—especially from interest groups, advocacy groups, from legislators. “Hey, here's what I couldn't get done in the legislature. Here's what I feel like is being stopped up by our own systems,” etc.—and put those together.
That alone is a massive process. We think six months or something—a huge process to really dig through that. And a huge product as well.
Imagine the legislature at the end of that coming back and saying, “Oh, wow, we've got this prioritized list of priorities from this representative sample of the public.” That's incredible.
Then the legislature would have a little bit of a gap—a little bit of a potential feedback loop—to go away and potentially get some of those things done. In which case, the assembly would come back, review the legislature’s work, and say:
“Yeah, okay, we think you did number one priority. You did that pretty well. You made a couple of revisions, but we’re fine with that.”
“Number two—you attempted that. You totally watered it down. We don’t like that at all. We’re going to do it better for you.”
“Number three—you didn’t address it at all,” etc.
So number two and three maybe go on to another assembly. We've been calling this the drafting—a drafting assembly—where they're working again for quite a long period of time to essentially write those laws with legal assistance.
And then some kind of store of money, some kind of endowment, that would be unlocked by a supermajority vote at the end of all that process to jumpstart the signature-gathering process and use the initiative system—and hopefully get, you know, other advocacy groups involved at that point. Sort of matchmaking. The assembly will know very well who their allies might be.
And, you know, I think for us, we feel like this uses an existing, highly popular American system that has a high degree of potential power. And if it only had sort of a deliberative arm to go with it—and also that it would not just, you know, kind of put negative pressure on the representative system, but hopefully be a positive force. Encourage that system to become more deliberative.
If—you know—we know that assemblies and initiatives are essentially the two most popular democratic pieces that we see in polling, maybe the legislature would get a little whiff of, “Hey, maybe we should be more like those things.”
Nice. That sounds amazing. We have a little bit of time left, and selfishly, I've got two things that I wanted to ask you about.
One is, you know, when I talk to people, there's this disbelief that everyday people can process these complicated issues. You know what I mean? It's such a funny instinct that people have.
How do you speak to that? And there's a process of education, I think, also that happens in the assembly too. Can you just speak to that—whether it's distrust or lack of faith in our neighbors to handle complicated issues?
Yeah, totally. I mean, it is kind of—it’s the sort of authoritarianism of the mind is the way I think about it. And it’s in all of us, including those of us who are working in this field all the time.
We have to—and I have to—sort of think: hey, hold on. Is that trusting the assembly here? Or are we trying to manufacture a situation that will, you know, prevent them from making a mistake, prevent them from—you know—be their parents, protect them from whatever?
No, no, no, no, no. All that patronizing crap has to go. That is the old way of thinking.
These are adults, just like you and me. They have brains that are extremely capable.
And we need to get beyond that elitism. And that becomes very hard when you’re responsible for a project that, you know, people put a lot of money into and that people’s political careers may be riding on a little bit. You really want it to go well.
But, you know, not only is that patronizing, but it also often means that we are inserting our own biases in ways that we probably don’t even realize—into a process—and not letting the assembly, in all of its incredible representativeness that we don’t have, that we will never have, do what it can do best on behalf of the public.
So we need to get out of our own—we need to get out of everybody’s way—and let the assembly do its job. And I think the other piece of this is that we have a really serious kind of inferiority complex as political people, I think. Most of us. Some of us have giant egos.
But what we find is that most people who respond are really unsure about their own ability to participate in this kind of thing.
And every single—without fail—every single process we do, we get a phone call that is like, “I'd love to do this. I can do this. I would love to do my civic duty as I see it. But—there’s no way I'm qualified to talk about housing.”
There’s one case, a bunch of years ago, a housing-related topic. And the person who had called and said this—she herself had lived in like three different types of housing. The thing was about some government subsidies for housing. She had lived in several different types, and the only one that she hadn’t lived in, her sister had lived in.
So nobody could possibly be more qualified, on a personal basis, in evaluating how these things work.
So we have to—you know—it’s often young people as well. I remember an instance of a high schooler who was like, “My mom told me to give you guys a call, but there's no way I’m doing this,” right?
And we were like, “No, actually, you're perfect. Please.”
And she ended up being one of the best people in the room. One of the best at pulling out—very quiet at first—but that's often the folks who are the best at pulling out the most ingenious, sort of cross-disciplinary solutions.
So yeah, we need to respect our own capacity—and each other’s capacity.Last question. Cause I know you've done a lot of thinking about this, and I've done a lot of thinking about this, because it applies here in Hudson. We're a community that's thinking about reforming its city charter. And this is like the wonkiest of wonky topics, but can you talk—how do you think about the application of civic assembly to the process of charter reform for a city?
Yeah, I think this is one of—it’s a super interesting area. One that we're particularly interested in, because it's complex. It's complex on multiple levels.
First of all, it's not very sexy. That's actually not the biggest issue. People often think, "Oh, we need a thing that's going to really pop out at people." But no—we've gotten similar response rates on topics that nobody seems to care about as ones that people do. I think it probably matters a little bit, but the fact is, when people are in the room, they buy into doing a thing about anything that is important. And people very quickly see how it affects them.
So that is not actually a challenge. But certainly, there is a challenge of just the mass of material that already exists. So that's kind of an interesting twist. We're not dealing with something that's just brand new.
In many of these cases, we're dealing with pre-existing plans and projects—or whatever—that are feeding into something. Existing conditions and so forth. But here is something that's a very dense legal document, and the different kinds of things in a charter, especially one that hasn't been reviewed in a long time, is chock full of all kinds of stuff.
So I think there's an interesting thing—we need to think about ways to make the work match the scope, as always. And one of those may be kind of a filtering feature of some kind near the beginning. That's pretty different than another assembly.
Maybe there needs to be—well, there needs to be both a filtering of kind of the more administrative tasks, perhaps of charter cleanup, into some subset of the assembly—or perhaps delegated to some other staff body or something. And then there also needs to be an agenda-setting process, maybe kind of similar to this initiative convention idea that I talked about a few minutes ago, to prioritize: What do we want to work on?
And then from there, we can get into a more traditional assembly process. But that stuff—that's going to take quite a long time.
There also needs to be—you know, and this is true for many processes, but I think even more in this case—a process discovery sort of process. It's terrible, but, you know, an educational period for the assembly to get advice and technical support from a bunch of different angles on just how to understand this thing.
What it is, what it's trying to do, where it came from, what are the sort of biases and inputs and whatever things that might have come into it in the past? What are things that we might consider doing with it? All this kind of stuff. It's going to be very heavy on the process discovery phase, I think.
Yeah. And beautiful. I want to respect your time—we’re at the end of the hour. This has been so much fun. I really appreciate you accepting my invitation, and I just think the work you're doing is really amazing. I'm going to include a bunch of links with the piece to give people as much chance to sort of encounter what you're doing as possible. So thank you so much, Linn.
Oh, well, Peter, I really appreciate your support. Thank you. This has been a pleasure.
And just to anybody who's interested in this—we're just a little nonprofit. We'd love to help you out, our friends, or whoever is trying to improve democracy. So please reach out to us any way you see on our website.
And thanks so much.
