9/2024 Athens

Onboarding Kit

For Members of DO’s Pilot Assembly for Europe 2024-2025

WELCOME aboard the Democratic Odyssey ship, setting sail from Athens with the very first meeting of the Pilot Assembly! 

First things first!  

Please sign up on this digital platform

Please respond to the questionnaire for DO assembly members 

In general, our Linktree is your go-to place 

You likely have many questions. Hence this Onboarding Kit. If anything is unclear let us know - this is a work in progress! 

1. What is DO’s mission? 

1. The message: For all the disparagement of Europe by Americans for not being innovative when it comes to technology and entrepreneurial prowess, it is, in fact, the most innovative place on the planet when it comes to governing institutions. Read more in Noema Magazine: “A Standing Peoples’ Assembly for Europe” 
2. The project: Never before have so many generations been alive at the same time on our planet. To face the unchartered waters ahead, they need to talk, disagree, negotiate and, hopefully, ultimately agree at local, national and transnational levels. Read more here. 
3. Our compass and signposts, here. 

2. “Who is who” – the Assembly members, the DO crew, the Constituent Network 

• A Travelling Assembly: Read more on the Assembly composition and how you were recruited, and also watch our brief preview of the sortition process. • "Consortium of navigators": The DO crew is made up of facilitation practioners, academics, civil society actors, foundations, official organisations and volunteers from all of Europe. 
• Network of friends: Over the last two years DO has gathered a network of friends, an ever-expanding Constituent Network of 600+ people from all walks of life, who contribute to the design of the pilot Assembly. 

3. Goal of the Athens meeting 

This weekend, you will discover what the Pilot Assembly is all about. We meet at an important moment globally in a year when more than half the world population is going to the polls, including many European countries. And we meet in the wake of elections of a new EU Parliament followed by a new Commission. And yet we ask: is democratic life reducible to the ballot box? Can the citizens themselves help set the next agenda for Europe. 

On Friday, you will join 200 citizens from over 20 countries for three days of deliberation powered by civic arts. Who says democracy should not be fun too! Our goal is both to gather your stories in their vast diversity, and for you to be able to agree on some key shared message gathered in a living document on DO’s digital platform.

Your mission in this first meeting is to chart a course for our ship, by providing an agenda for further discussions at the next meeting of the Assembly.  

Our meeting will not be a secret behind closed doors. It will be livestreamed on a platform accessible to all and embedded in local life thanks to our democracy festival in Klafthmonos square Saturday night. We meet under the auspices of the city of Athens and the region of Attica, in dialogue with local and European decision-makers. In collaboration with the Municipality and the Region, we hope to plant local democratic seeds. These seeds will also be disseminated across our locations. 

Consider this moment as only the beginning of a journey. This will be an experiment, and therefore highly imperfect. DO's ambition is to make progress with you as co designers of the Assembly. 

4. Our topic for deliberation 

Reflecting on your experience of recent crises, what needs to change for Europeans to overcome future storms? And, how can we, the people, help better steer the European ship? 

We have already shared our starting question with you. The choice of this topic was crowdsourced with the project’s Constituent Network over the last year. But as the journey continues, you, the members of the Assembly, will refine and refocus the question as you see fit.  

You will draw from your experience in order to deliberate on what is to be done to address the struggle our democracies face in the midst of crises. Many of you have already mentioned various crisis during onboarding - financial, health, migration, climate, environment, fires/floods, and yes, war at our door.... Thinking of these stories, how do you think crisis has affected democratic practices in Athens, Greece, Europe? Did these crisis moments animate or threaten democracy? Or both? Can you reimagine the ways our democratic practices affect our capacity to navigate through storms? In the end, do we want to make the case for a Standing Peoples’ Assembly as an agenda setter for European politics? 

5. Next steps after the Athens Assembly

This is the first part of a journey that will take your travelling assembly from city to city across the continent as it grows to 500 members by the Spring, meeting both online and in person. The next stops will include Florence and Vienna, with online gatherings in between. If we have wind in our sails, our Odyssey might take us to many more cities and countryside areas. No worries! We will eventually set sails back to Athens. DO process will be anchored in local lived experiences and yet seek to come up with shared approached. This is what we mean by trans-local democracy. 

You will remain members for a year until you are replaced through rotation. 

From its Athens meeting onward the Assembly will be convened online as well as in situ, while co-designing its own working practices. Groups of different sizes can decide to meet on line. To facilitate this process the online platform’s debate section offers built-in translation in 22 languages and will connect different Assembly moments. Don’t miss the follow-up online assembly meeting in November 2024 – stay tuned!  

6. Civic arts: Innovative methods for deliberation  

The DO Pilot Assembly experiments with a large range of methods – from conventional facilitation to participatory art projects - each of which offer different ways to participate in a democratic conversation. You will find an overview of our Civic Arts approach here. European Tapestry; Street Song writing 

7. Diving deeper 

The digital platform is the one-stop shop for harnessing our collective intelligence and help the European agenda and connect it with the opinions of the non-selected participants - that is, the public! Please flag the digital platform to your networks, we are counting on you to make this a vibrant space! 

Simultaneously, the platform will also remind us of the Assembly’s journey, for instance through the recordings of Assembly sessions and the records of the materials shared with you. 

This is a fully transparent and inclusive process, where we invite your friends and families to both join our Assembly co-design and also contribute to these debates on the platform.