Citizens Assemblies are processes that bring together a representative group of citizens from different walks of life to discuss problems. These can be used to overcome political gridlock and to use diverse perspectives to improve policy approaches.
Assemblies in the UK have been held by several of the UK’s Parliaments, by local authorities, NHS Trusts, and by academic institutions.
To help us add citizens assemblies to CAPE, we have done upstream work in making it easier to find and keep track of citizens assemblies. We have:
An archive of Citizens Assemblies
Because citizens assemblies are not standardised processes, there isn’t one place where you can see all the assemblies that have been held, or read what they concluded. Involve has maintained a tracker, but this has fallen a few years out of date.
To add information about local citizens assemblies on climate change to our CAPE website, we needed to create a good up-to-date dataset. To do this in a sustainable way, we now host a register that aims to cover citizens assemblies held in the UK.
Using an automated trawl of all local authority websites, which we then reviewed to remove false positives, we identified ten new citizens assemblies in addition to the one’s Involve had already collected.
But that turned out to be the easy part. The bigger problem was due to local government website changes, many of the links that had worked a few years ago were broken, and needed to be added manually.
We’ve found updated links, and where possible links directly to the PDF final report. We have added a cache of these PDF reports to our registry – meaning we’re preserving a record of reports, and that services using our register can fall back on our backup if a future re-organisation breaks the links again.
(This may have fallen out of date by the time we publish the blog post – let us know if we’re missing yours!)
Licencing democratic documents
Citizens assemblies as new democratic processes do not have standardised forms for publishing recommendations or reports. Part of that lack of standardisation is inconsistency on how the final report is licenced (meaning the terms under which someone can reuse or share the report).
Our view is that for Citizens’ Assemblies held by public authorities, or funded with public money, the results of the assembly should be released under either the Open Parliament/Open Government licence – or the equivalent Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).
This wouldn’t just clarify “it’s fine to rehost in a cache or archive” but would allow explicit re-use and re-publication in other forms. Most reports are only published as PDFs, meaning there would be added value from a site that did for Citizens Assemblies what TheyWorkForYou does for Parliaments – bringing all the information together in one place. It would also be permissive to translations of citizens assembly reports into other languages, or for re-publication and compilations of recommendations on similar themes.
Reviewing the 39 reports we have in our database: 24 had no information on copyright or licensing, 4 were published under Open Government/Equivalent CC licence, 7 were published under a slightly more restrictive CC licence (not allowing commercial usage), and 4 explicitly claimed general copyright in some shape or form.
These differences are generally explained by different facilitator organisations writing reports. Shared Future’s template report consistently uses the same CC licence. Organisations that work with a mixture of public and private clients may retain copyright boilerplate sometimes without thinking about it, and for smaller organisations, there may not be awareness of the benefits of permissive licensing of democratic documents.
In other cases, there may be an attitude that licensing is something that is none of the facilitator’s concern – they produce the information for the client who should release it themselves however is appropriate. As a result, the document itself is silent on the copyright status. In practice authorities will just rehost the file that the facilitator provides; so what is eventually published is similarly silent on the status of the document.
GIven this, our recommendation is that facilitators should establish a standard view on a default licence for public sector clients, and have that conversation with the public authority.
Due to the public benefit in maintaining an archive of the results of citizens assemblies, we include the complete set – including those that are explicitly copyrighted – in our cache.
The explicitly copyrighted entries are:
- Oxford City Council 2019 Climate Assembly – 2019 Ipsos MORI – all rights reserved.
- City of Wolverhampton 2020 Climate Assembly – Marked “Private and Confidential” by BritainThinks
- Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council 2021 Climate Assembly – Marked copyrighted by Cynnal Cymru – Sustain Wales, 2021
- UCL’s Constitution Unit – Democracy in the UK – Copyright – The Constitution Unit and Involve 2022
We are happy to have conversations with any of the organisations involved.
Updating our guidance
In 2019, we published a set of guidance on useful possible features to host on a website for a Citizens Assembly before, during, and after the assembly. We have updated this with clearer sections on licensing approaches, and inviting depositing a copy in our dataset as a long term archive.
Header image: Photo by Glen Noble on Unsplash
