Announcing Our Civic Assembly Lottery and Topics

Today, CivicLex hosted our civic lottery for our 36-person Civic Assembly taking place in March of this year. It's a major milestone of our assembly, and after 3 years of work, we finally know who will be invited to serve on our panel! We also announced our topics!

We hit the mark on all nine of our demographic categories to be represented on our panel: race, age, education, political registration, gender, income, housing status, council district, and interactions with CivicLex. It's not perfectly exact, but the panel will be largely representative across all of them.

Our topics? How frequently our city charter should be reviewed and how much council members should be paid.

A couple notes:

As a local org doing an assembly all ourself, we noticed that a decent number of the people who received one of our 10,000 mailers and responded (341 completed applications) had been to a CivicLex event or interacted with us in some way. So, we put a cap on the number of panelists who had donated to CivicLex or attended one of our events -- just one person.

For those that are nerds like us, we used Panelot, and our 341 completed applications produced 204 possible panels. We used a bingo cage to draw our final panel.

For the two topics, we narrowed it down to two via a public survey. We ended up choosing the topic with the most unanimity (charter review -- 75% said it should happen regularly) and the most divisive (council pay -- 43% to increase, 42% stay the same).

Big congrats to Kit Anderson for the tireless work on this project to date, and to Lilly Bramley, Haley Wartell, and Javan Thomas! March, here we come!