PROCURING FOR THE FUTURE.

A NEW WAY TO HEAR FROM THE PUBLIC

Many cities and counties have a sincere desire to learn more about what their residents feel about potential policies. One traditional, and common, way of doing this is through council meetings that are open to the public, which often attract the same small group of people who have the time and inclination to focus on the topic being discussed.

These sessions are frequently made up of an hour or two of council business, followed by people standing at a microphone to talk for three minutes, just at a time when everyone on the dais is worn out.

But there’s a far better system than that, which has gained traction around the world, and is finally coming to the United States. The approach uses Civic Assemblies, which bring in a randomly-selected, broadly representative group of people, who are involved in a process that includes being educated about the topic at hand, discussing potential approaches and finally creating a series of recommendations to advise their elected and appointed leaders.

These have become particularly popular in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America (notably Brazil), some of which get as high as 15 percent of the mixture of people invited to participate from a wide variety of demographic groups.

Entities in the United States are just beginning to use this potentially powerful technique; the largest of which is Snohomish County, Washington, which has a population of over 870,000 and forms part of the Seattle Metropolitan Area. Their list of recommendations was put together on June 6 and 7.

Snohomish County’s civic assembly was organized by Civic Genius, which used to be an independent organization, then came under the National Civic League umbrella in late 2024. The county was considering entering the brave new world of Artificial Intelligence and leaders there wanted to get a good sense of what the public really thought was important before jumping headlong into the unknown.

“I was really inspired by the idea,’ says City Councilmember Nate Nehring, “I think it's a really cool project to get increased citizen engagement in the public process, and as an elected official, I would love to get more engagement and get more input and get their ideas for consideration.”

Supported by philanthropic donations from five different foundations, Civic Genius was able to cast a giant-sized net in order to come up with a group of 40 Snohomish residents, the majority of whom would ultimately participate in a series of three weekends during which their goal was to come up with a set of recommendations for the county to use as it considered the directions. “We mailed out 15,000 letters, combining lists from the voter file and the tax records,” recalls Jillian Youngblood, executive director of Civic Genius. “And then we hand delivered about 250 to social service organizations and to direct care providers, so we make sure that we're hitting on the full population including, maybe, people who didn’t have permanent addresses.”

Assembly members represented a broad cross-section of Snohomish County’s population across age, gender, race ethnicity, and geography. Members were not chosen for expertise on AI; they were invited as residents, who could bring their lived experience to the process.

There are a number of ways that Civic Assemblies differ from other means of gathering citizen input. One of the most significant is to provide a stipend for participants who were expected to spend three weekends in order to go through the entire process. In Snohomish County’s case, Civic Genius offered $500 for about 40 hours or participation. That payment can easily make a difference for people who need to pay for child care or transportation in order to participate.

Step one was to bring in subject matter experts in order to educate the residents about the topics so that they’d be able to engage in informed discussions and ultimately come up with recommendations that had their basis in the knowledge they had acquired at the outset.

The experts included tech experts from the University of Washington, who focus on artificial intelligence, a law professor from Seattle University, a city council member who also works for Dell Technologies, and others, including Al Hleileh, Co-Founder and CEO of Civic Marketplace and an expert in AI. They were joined by the former Prime Minister of Norway “who happened to be in town, and she actually has a lot to say about the governance of tech and AI in Europe and in Norway, so she came and spoke to us and did a Q&A about what governance looks like in other places, recalls Youngblood.

Hleileh was deeply impressed at the way the audience to which he spoke was approaching the topic. “The group's questions were not the questions I usually hear in government technology circles,’ he says. “They were not about procurement timelines, vendor selection criteria, or interoperability standards. They were more fundamental — and more searching — than that.

“They wanted to know whether AI systems could be wrong specifically, not just wrong in the aggregate. They wanted to know what happens to their data when a vendor is sold or acquired. They wanted to understand who is accountable when an algorithm influences a decision about a permit, a benefit, or a risk score — and whether they would ever know that an algorithm was involved at all. The residents in that room understood, instinctively, that the question was not whether AI is capable of improving public services — they could see that it was. The question was who it serves, under what conditions, and what is the recourse when it gets things wrong.

“What struck me most was a specific kind of clarity that civic assembly participants tend to develop. Because they have no institutional position to defend, no budget to protect, and no procurement relationship to maintain, they are free to ask the questions that practitioners sometimes avoid.”

Another city councilmember, Jared Mead, who, like Nehring, has been a staunch advocate of this approach, is particularly impressed by the educational part of the process. As he says, “These citizen assembly members probably know more about AI than any of the county council members who are going to be voting on the policies that they've recommended to us at the end of this.”

Step two – the second weekend-long session – involved the participants reflecting on what they’d learned and thinking through the various approaches the county might take. “We had five tables of eight,” says Youngblood. “We move people around; there's a lot of different configurations. They also spent time doing a pair share, where you write down what you want to bring to the table, you share it with one other person and talk about it together because not everybody's ready to speak in a big group. We want to make sure that people are in duos and trios and small groups and plenary sessions, so that everybody has an opportunity to participate in the way that's going to feel optimal for them.”

Adds Youngblood, “AI was a great topic because although there's certainly a lot of different opinions, they don't really break down along partisan lines, and people don't have calcified views of this topic. The major political parties haven't really staked out clear positions, so there's not like a signal that I'm a Democrat or I'm a Republican, and this is therefore what I think about that.”

Three weeks after all this work had been done the final step, on the first weekend in June, was to assemble the recommendations about AI for the council’s review. “There was a fair amount of overlap,” says Youngblood,” which I think is good. That means that different groups of totally different people working with the same information came up with similar ideas, which suggests that those ideas will have broad appeal.”

Of the 32 people who showed up on the first day, 29 participated in the formation of the final recommendations, and discussed and debated the ideas that the group had come up with. “We then went through a marathon voting session,” explains Youngblood. “People had monitors at their tables and they were making edits and when they were done with that we put everything up on a big screen and then everyone voted anonymously so they could see in real time what the vote count was.” Anything that got votes from over 80 percent of the participants moved forward to become part of the final document.

Three or four assembly members will actually do the presentation about the recommendations to the council “and then as many other as are available can come in and be in the audience and talk to council members and answer questions,” says Youngblood.

Just one of the proposed recommendations received 100 percent of the vote: “The county should only use AI if, after considering the scale of the problem or the efficient accuracy and accountability, the tool is the best solution.”

Seven of the others received support from over 95 percent of the group. A small sampling:

· “The county should consider the current and future budget implications and how they affect the constituents of the county.”

· “The county should ensure that when the outcome of an algorithm has an adverse impact to a resident, then a county employee shall manually verify the outcome and provide an avenue for appeal.”

· “The county should immediately disclose to residents through plainly stated language or an obvious banner that they are interacting with (an) AI-based communication system.”

· “The county should audit AI systems at a frequency determined by the system’s risk-based classification. Audits should document and evaluate a system’s accuracy, reliability, efficiency ad transparency.”

“I think they’re pretty implementable,” says Youngblood. “They’re not things like creating a new department or banning all data centers or thing that are going to have a lot of moving parts. These are recommendation that the council can absolutely turn into legislation and move forward.”

This article was supported by and written in partnership with Civic Marketplace.

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