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Dimension: Representativeness

Select participants

Ability to fairly select participants according to some definition of representation.

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Transnational
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How this is performed now...

Process organizers
Process organizers use existing algorithms and tools to implement the normative selection criteria that they set out. 100+ citizens’ assemblies around the world at every level of governance have used these. They take a pool of willing participants and select a final ‘panel’ that adheres to set criteria.

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Automated Recruitment Tool

Urgent
AI-powered recruitment system that automates demographic targeting, campaign creation, multi-channel outreach, and participant selection using real-time census-like data and advanced selection methodologies.
AI/ML
Impact
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Related Capabilities: Select participants, Reach participants

Related Goals and Research Questions

Goal: Deep intersectional representation that more closely matches the constituent population (even with high-quality selection pools).

What are the limits of intersectional representation in sortition algorithms and where are trade-offs most present?

Statistics & Sampling Ethics & Philosophy
Related Capability: Select participants

Goal: Stratification approaches that best balance desiderata such as public trust, deliberative quality, epistemic quality, and the legitimacy of panels.

What is the relationship between different selection variables and public trust, deliberative quality, epistemic quality, and output quality?

Political Science Statistics & Sampling
Related Capability: Select participants

In which contexts does trust increase with reweighting (e.g. to account for affectedness, power imbalances, history, etc.)?

Political Science Psychology
Related Capability: Select participants

Goal: Manage representation guarantees across iterative and parallel panels.

How can representation be managed across iterations of panels or many panels in parallel?

Statistics & Sampling Political Science
Related Capability: Select participants

What are the best methods for constructing attrition-robust panels?

Statistics & Sampling
Related Capability: Select participants

Goal: Tools that better understand the impacts on outcomes and trade-offs implicit in making specific design decisions such as the depth or kinds of intersections types of representation and fairness.

There are no related research questions at the moment.

Goal: Process designers who can make informed decisions that balance intersectional representation and panel selection feasibility.

How to quickly provide information on the consequences for different types and ranges of intersectional constraints on selecting participants?

Statistics & Sampling
Related Capability: Select participants

Goal: Panel compositions that are robust to expected attrition.

What are the best methods for constructing attrition-robust panels?

Statistics & Sampling
Related Capability: Select participants

Related Resources

Fair algorithms for selecting citizens’ assemblies

Sortition algorithms have been designed to select participants according to quotas, balancing representativeness, fairness and manipulation resistance (Flanigan, 2021; Baharav, 2024).
Research
Bailey Flanigan, Paul Gölz, Anupam Gupta, Brett Hennig and Ariel D. Procaccia

Fair, manipulation-robust, and transparent sortition

Proposes the "Goldilocks" equality objective for sortition algorithms that balance fairness, manipulation-robustness, and transparency when selecting representative panels for Citizens' Assemblies. The algorithm ensures no volunteer receives too little or too much chance of selection, achieving n...
Research
Carmel Baharav and Bailey Flanigan

Alternates, Assemble! Selecting Optimal Alternates for Citizens' Assemblies

Develops an optimization framework for selecting alternate participants for citizens' assemblies to minimize expected demographic imbalance when dropouts occur. The method uses historical data to estimate dropout likelihood and provides theoretical guarantees regarding sample requirements and est...
Research
Angelos Assos, Carmel Baharav, Bailey Flanigan and Ariel Procaccia

Panelot

Panelot is a not-for-profit sortition tool that facilitates random citizen selection for deliberative panels in a way that is representative of the population and fair to volunteers. It operates through a two-step process: first generating a fair distribution across multiple panels meeting demogr...
Product
Panelot