There's an email going around (thanks, Jock!), from Tom Atlee:

In 2003 the government of British Columbia convened a Citizens' Assembly on Electoral Reform...

This Assembly was formed with 160 randomly selected citizens charged with reviewing existing and innovative voting systems. After ten months of study, reviewing hundreds of written submissions, holding public hearings, hearing from experts, and deliberating together, they finally announced their recommendations in October 2004...

...The Citizens Assembly meetings have been public and shown on TV. There have been regular news releases and postings on their website, which includes history of the Assembly, FAQs, the materials they reviewed and more -- all made very public.

There's only a light tech side to this, although the project would be unthinkable without the public-ness the Net affords.

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