Informed Participation: A Guide to Designing Public Deliberation Processes

This publication is Volume II of The Deliberation Series, a collection of papers on public deliberation, researched and written by The Open Government Partnership’s Practice Group on Dialogue and Deliberation.

Public dialogue and deliberation can help solve “complex” issues, especially where difficult trade-offs must be made, or priorities set. There are many good models for this kind of engagement, including roundtables, citizens’ juries, and deliberative conferences. Different issues raise different challenges and different models can help meet these challenges in different ways.

Rather than favoring one approach over the others, Informed Participation starts with a set of questions that help planners frame their issue, choose the right model to address it, and design a process that fits the circumstances.

Volume II of The Deliberation Series is a guide for designing deliberative processes. It walks practitioners through the key tasks and questions, step-by-step, to help them design a process that matches the issue they are trying to solve.