The Travelling Assembly

For Members of DO’s Pilot Assembly, 2024-2025, as well as observers and all other interested indivduals.

WELCOME aboard the Democratic Odyssey ship, which set sail from Athens in September 2024 with the very first meeting of the Pilot Assembly! Our ship is now arriving in Florence. This weekend, you will discover what the Pilot Assembly is all about.

Everyone (Assembly Members, members of the public) can join our debates on the topic - please sign up (External link) to this digital platform to get started!

In general, our Linktree (External link) is your go-to place for all DO related questions, including our Athens report (External link).

You likely have many questions. Hence this Onboarding Kit, which provides you with all the basic information needed to understand the complexity of Democratic Odyssey. If anything is unclear let us know by writing to us at DemocraticOdyssey@eui.eu - this is a work in progress! 

1. What is DO’s mission? 

We explain all these points more in detail by fleshing out "Our Compass (External link)", but in short:

1. The message: Some point at Europe for not being innovative enough when it comes to technology and entrepreneurial prowess. In fact, it is one of the most innovative places on the planet when it comes to renewing governance, and it still shows a lot of promising results for making this transformation much more systematic. Read more in Noema Magazine: “A Standing Peoples’ Assembly for Europe” (External link). 
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 global levels. Read more here (External link).

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

• A Travelling Assembly: Read more (External link) on the Assembly composition and how you were recruited, and also watch our brief preview (External link) of the sortition process.
• "Consortium of navigators": The DO crew (External link) is made up of facilitation experts, academics, civil society actors, foundations, 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 (External link) of 700+ people from all walks of life, who contribute to the design of the pilot Assembly.

3. Goal of DO's in-person meetings

This year's pilot Assembly will design a Citizens' Charter on "A citizens’ agenda in times of crisis", to be promoted by the Democratic Odyssey as soon as this first Assembly cycle completes its final recommendations.

Athens meeting:

We met at an important moment globally in a year when more than half the world population went to the polls, including many European countries. And we met in the wake of elections of a new EU Parliament. 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 27 September 2024, 200 Assembly Members 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 (External link).

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

Our meeting was not secret and behind closed doors. It was livestreamed (External link) and embedded in local life thanks to our Festival of Democracy in Klafthmonos Square, on Saturday night. We met 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 planted local democratic seeds (External link). These seeds will also be disseminated across all locations the Assembly is travelling to. 

Consider this moment as only the beginning of a journey where we are all co-designers (External link) of the Assembly itself.

Florence meeting:

For our second in-person meeting, ambassadors of our first Assembly Members (who met in Athens) were joined by 50 new members, residents of Florence. We met in the iconic Salone dei Cinquecento in Palazzo Vecchio, where the Republic of Florence practiced participatory democracy 500 years ago. We built on the discussions and conclusions of the Athens meeting summarised in our Athens report (External link), and started shaping future recommendations to be passed on to the concluding meeting in Vienna next May. 

We were joined by local and EU officials who have been following our process and are committed to taking into account our final recommendations at the EU, national and local level of governance.

To ensure continuity between our meetings, those members who weren't in Florence in person were able to follow the event through livestreaming (find it here (External link)), to virtually participate and intervene on the digital platform thanks to a facilitator specifically for the virtual Assembly Members, and contribute through a dedicated Zoom slot on Sunday 23 February.

To reflect our commitment to local embeddedness, we also organised "The Village for Civic Action" as part of a "Festival of Democracy". For more information on this, follow us on Instagram (External link) and LinkedIn (External link).

4. Our topic for deliberation 

The choice of this year's Assembly topic (External link) was crowdsourced with the project’s Constituent Network (External link) before the Athens meeting and as the journey continues, the Members of the Assembly refine and refocus the question.

In Florence, we continued drawing from the Members' experience in order to deliberate on what is to be done to address the struggles our democracies face in the midst of crises. Many Assembly Members have already mentioned various crises during the onboarding process - financial, health, migration, climate, environment, fires/floods, and yes, war at our door... Thinking of these stories, how do you think crises have affected democratic practices in Athens, Greece, Europe? Did these moments of crisis 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

This journey will take our travelling Assembly from city to city and across the continent, as it grows to 400 members by the end of its first cycle. The docking cities are Athens, 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 the cities we have travelled to. DO process will be anchored in local lived experiences and yet seek to come up with shared approaches. This is what we mean by trans-local democracy. 

Assembly Members will remain members for a year (External link) until you are replaced through rotation. 

From Athens, to Florence, through to Vienna, the meetings of 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 online. To facilitate this process, this online platform’s "Debates (External link)" section offers built-in translation in 22 languages and will connect different Assembly moments. See our timeline here (External link).

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 take part in a democratic conversation. You will find an overview of our Civic Arts approach here (External link).

7. Diving deeper 

The digital platform is the one-stop shop for harnessing our collective intelligence and connecting 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 (External link) our Assembly co-design and also contribute to these debates on the platform.