Suzette Brooks Masters

to be invited, and then there's a lottery system to determine who goes.

So the brilliance of that is you need to step up to say, I'm interested, I'm engaged.

It doesn't go to the loudest voices, the people that always go, right?

And you have a different set of people at these events who are going with a different purpose in mind.

Right.

So it's about talking about the issues.

It's about seeing where there's some common ground of giving input to this elected official about what you want for your town or your city or whatever your district is.

as opposed to the kind of NIMBY, I don't know if NIMBY is a familiar term.

Yeah, yeah, it's a thing in the UK, yes.

The sort of pre-litigation posture that everyone has when you go, you're on one side or another side, you're advocating for your position.

There's no effort to find common ground or find common solutions.

Everyone's just yelling from their soapbox about whatever they're... So I think that's really promising if a tool like that could start...

shaping these ubiquitous but unproductive events, right?

Similarly, you mentioned citizens' assemblies.

I think they have a lot of potential, and I'm involved with the Fund for Citizens' Assemblies, which is a new entity that's been created through the Democracy Funders Network.

It's quite small, but we're thinking about...

how to help experiments in citizens' assemblies actually get off the ground, because it's starting to really get ahead of steam here.

There are a number of organizations that were started in Europe but have now extended their activity to the U.S., like Democracy Next and FIDE, and they're creating...

a whole pipeline from the local to the state and increasingly tackling issues that the government's been unable to tackle satisfactorily, or even at the margin, issues that the public is surfacing as the issues they want to have dealt

So that was a more meta way of can you use a citizens assembly to surface the issues that you want citizens assemblies to tackle, you know?