Deliberative Events

Citizen Forums

The phrase Citizens Forum is adopted from Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies and follows their approach to "refining methods for bringing the voices of 'ordinary' citizens into the public arena and studying what happens when they deliberate together." We also draw upon a growing body of knowledge about how deliberative democracy works at the grassroots level – through, for example, Citizen Juries (the Jefferson Center), National Issues Forums (NIF), and large-scale town hall meetings (AmericaSpeaks).

Throughout all these applications of deliberative democracy – face-to-face and online – the tasks of representing issues, getting good samples, creating the conditions for well-structured conversations, and conducting useful surveys are enormous. The resources needed in terms of time and personnel are daunting. In short, the task of doing democracy, of making democracy stronger, is incredibly hard. But in today’s world, we have no other choice. And it is our hope that well-designed forums, augmented by well-designed online tools, will help in some way to bring about these needed changes.

Campus Conversations

Carnegie Mellon University is applying the concept and practice of deliberative polling at the campus level. The result of this effort is to (1) create social capital within the student body, (2) raise the level of campus-wide discussions of important issues to new levels, and (3) highlight the virtues of campus diversity, as this is embedded in the nature of deliberative polls.

These campus-wide polls will be held twice yearly on matters of relevance to the campus community. Each poll will educate the campus community about the many facets of, and interpretations of, the issues to be discussed.