9/2024 Athens
First Meeting of the Pilot Transnational Peoples’ Assembly
Promjene u "Athens meeting"
Opis (English)
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Why? The Democratic Odyssey and its crowdsourced campaign is advocating for a “permanent peoples’ assembly for Europe”. We are mobilising a wide-ranging and pluralistic group of actors, including academics, practitioners, journalists, institutional representatives and civil society. The endeavour is inspired by tentative efforts of past EU legislatures to institutionalise citizen participation. Our goal is to push them to go further.
Where? To make the case, we are embarking on a journey with a pilot assembly. Over the course of 2024-2025 it will become a travelling assembly which instead of meeting in Brussels, will travel to different European cities, meeting both in-person and online. The assembly will thus connect different cities as city envoys and transnational citizens bridge its different meetings, and it will plant the seed for further citizens' engagement in each port.
Who? The members of the assembly will be citizens randomly selected by lottery from across Europe to engage in multilingual, transnational deliberations to contribute to the EU’s future agenda. The pilot assembly will start with 200 participants and will continue to grow as it travels to other cities. Members will include both citizens from most EU countries as well as from some candidate countries, and locally randomly selected citizens from Greece and other cities. Members of civil society organisations will also be included.
Our horizon? The assembly will aim to conclude with a “citizens’ agenda for the future of the EU”. In the end ‘the medium is the message”: we will explore the next frontiers of citizen engagement - from tech-enhancement to immersive debating techniques and democratising foresight. Our governance structure is radically open and inclusive - centered around both our Constituent Network and Consortium. As a pilot assembly, the name of the game here is experimentation and imperfection. We welcome observers, evaluators, and critiques. Feel free to reach out to us: DemocraticOdyssey@eui.eu
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Athens will be the first stop of our long journey towards discussing this year’s topic (External link). Together we will navigate through several days of intense deliberation and explore different techniques as to how we could bring out the best deliberative spirit, across all groups of participants. We will be experimenting with the most innovative facilitation techniques, including the use of civic arts as a means to convey meaning and emotions. The official programme for the weekend of 27-29 September will be made available very soon, so please watch the space!
On the road to Athens, the organisers will “onboard” randomly selected participants, as well as facilitators, observers, evaluators. This will be a preparatory process for these groups to become acquainted with the process of the Assembly and how it navigates through time (the different sessions) and space (the various cities and the online dimension). All information that is shared with these groups of actors will be documented in full transparency, so that the process can be also observed by the general public through this platform.
