Yours sincerely,
The EDDY core committee  (Jan Maly, Arianna Novaro, and Frederik Van De
Putte)

[apologies for cross-posting] The European Digital DemocracY network (EDDY) is having its fourth _online meetup_on Monday, March 4th at 15h00 (Paris time) on the topic of “Diversity in Citizen Assemblies: Why does it matter and how can it be achieved”, featuring Hélène Landemore (Political Science Institute, Yale University) and Brett Hennig (Sortition Foundation). See below for a description of the topic and speakers. In order to participate and/or receive announcements of other upcoming events, please subscribe to our mailing list (https://list.uva.nl/mailman/listinfo/eddy) or go to our webpage <https://www.eddy-network.eu/home>. Yours sincerely, The EDDY core committee  (Jan Maly, Arianna Novaro, and Frederik Van De Putte) ======================== Diversity in Citizen Assemblies: Why does it matter and how can it be achieved Citizen assemblies offer an alternative way for making political decisions by bringing together a broadly representative selection of citizens, chosen by lottery, that deliberates on a specific topic. One key promise of citizen assemblies is that the diversity of perspectives in the population is represented in the composition of the assembly. In this meet-up we will hear about and discuss why this diverse range of perspectives matters and how it can be achieved in practice. Presentations Hélène Landemore: "What's so great about deliberation among a randomly selected group? Instrumental and intrinsic benefits" In this talk I rehearse the advantages presented by deliberation among a randomly selected group of citizens (as opposed to deliberation among, say, an elected or self-selected group). I explain why the diversity of perspectives brought in by a random group presents instrumental benefits in terms of information aggregation and knowledge production, despite the additional sources of value disagreement that this diversity also entails. I also defend the more intrinsic benefits of deliberation among randomly selected people, including the emergence of civic friendship, solidarity, and even love, emotions that seem in vanishing supply in our increasingly segregated and polarized political systems. Brett Hennig: “Sortition in Theory and Practice” If sortition is a great way to bring diverse voices together in a deliberative forum, how is it actually achieved and where has it been used recently? I will get into the mechanics of how representative samples of people are selected and brought together by democratic lottery, and will introduce some of the recent examples of where this has happened: in Ireland to talk about drug policy, in Germany to talk about food and nutrition, and in France to talk about assisted dying. And who knows: perhaps Sortition Foundation's campaign to replace the House of Lords in the UK with a sortition-selected House of Citizens will be given a boost by the elections in the UK later this year? About the speakers Hélène Landemore <https://www.helenelandemore.com/> is a Full Professor in the Political Science department at Yale University and a Faculty Fellow with Yale’s Institute for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), where she leads a research agenda on Citizens' Assemblies within Democratic Innovations, a new ISPS program designed to identify and test ideas for improving the quality of democratic representation and governance. Brett Hennig <https://www.bretthennig.com/about> co-founded and is a director of the Sortition Foundation <http://www.sortitionfoundation.org/>, which helped run the Global Assembly <https://globalassembly.org/> and campaigns to institute the use of democratic lotteries (also called sortition) in government.