Our mission is to shift who has power and how we take decisions in government and other organisations of daily life. We work towards a more just, joyful, and collaborative future where everyone has meaningful power to shape their societies.
Grounded in rigorous research and extensive practice in the field, we’re both a knowledge hub and action lab on Citizens’ Assemblies, deliberation, and sortition - the practice of selecting decision makers by lottery. We connect networks who share a goal of innovating democratic governance.
We serve as a connector of knowledge and people to help the field of democratic innovation to grow and thrive. We collect data and good practices, create resources, frameworks, and guidelines, and convene networks. We work to seed and strengthen the democratic infrastructure necessary for sustainable change, scaling the number of people and organisations with the know-how to implement and facilitate deliberative assemblies through our learning programs and capacity building activities.
We provide technical advice and expertise on the design of institutionalised Assemblies that are more than one-offs and provide support for the relational and political work to ensure change is sustainable. To us, Citizens’ Assemblies are not just ‘tools’ that should complement elections. Our work is about building new institutions. We think the architecture of democracy needs to expand to include Assemblies with real weight and power. We want to see empowered, decision-making Assemblies next.
While we have evidence of ‘what works’, there are still many unanswered research questions and many innovations to be tried and tested. We are prototyping tech-enhanced deliberative assemblies. We are exploring more-than-human governance approaches. And we are expanding the core ideas of Citizens’ Assemblies into other domains beyond government.