Village Assembly: guide

What the Village Assembly does

The Village Assembly helps a group think a decision through before it makes it. A panel of synthetic seats rehearses the argument, so you can see where the argument splits, where it settles too fast and where the evidence is thin. The report that comes back is a place to start. It never recommends, and your members decide. You can seal a report as a signed record where your Village's signing is available, and compare two reports side by side.

It is for a facilitator running a real question: how a hall spends its reserve, what a trust does with a bequest, how a council frames a consultation.

A worked example: the hall committee

The hall committee has a reserve and two good uses for it: a new roof, or solar panels. The rest of this guide follows that question.

More situations

• A trust deciding what to do with a bequest. Run it twice: once framed as "spend it now" and once as "invest it for the years ahead", then compare the two reports side by side. If the panel settles fast, look for the "settled too quickly" flag and strengthen the opposing seat before you rely on it.
• A council framing a consultation. Use the rehearsal to see where the framing tilts the argument. The software never fills a seat that belongs to tangata whenua with a synthetic voice: bring those people in yourself. The report is a place to start, and the council still decides.
• A club where one view always wins. A facilitator can add a further opposing seat, push the counter-argument harder and read the topics where every seat agrees, asking what evidence is missing there, because easy agreement is where a weak spot hides.

The steps, in order

1. Open an assembly. From the Village Assembly page, choose the deliberation the question belongs to and write the question in your own words.
2. Frame. The platform proposes a map of what affects what, the gaps in the evidence and at least two ways of framing the question. You check each part, place the items yourself and approve. Nothing is used until you approve.
3. Rehearse. Choose two to five seats, at least one of them opposing the question. Add up to six topics, each with its own question, and any published sources the panel may cite. Choose how deep to go (3, 8 or 12 rounds) and how hard the counter-argument pushes. Start it and leave: the page updates by itself, and a stalled rehearsal can be restarted, and it resumes at the topic it stopped on.
4. Read the report. Each topic shows the positions the panel took as bars, with how many seats held each. Open any position to see which seats held it and what they cited.
5. Decide together. Hand the report to your group when they are ready. When the group has finished, close the stage with a note of up to 500 characters in your own words. The decision itself is made in the Deliberation Village by your members, and nothing here records one.
6. Seal and check. Where sealing is available for your Village, the report is sealed as a signed record. The Seal page checks that the receipt is valid and that the report still matches the one that was sealed.

How to read the report

• A position held only by opposing seats is kept as its own bar and is never folded into the majority, so the dissent stays visible.
• "Settled too quickly" means the panel agreed in fewer rounds than it needs. Treat it as untested and look at it properly in the room.
• "Thin evidence" marks a topic where the sources do not support what was said.
• A seat that stands for tangata whenua is never played by a machine. The report says so and says that real people are needed.
• There is no recommendation anywhere in the report. That is deliberate.

What changes when you choose differently

• Add or remove a seat and the bars may change, because the panel is built from the seats you list.
• A deeper rehearsal gives the panel more rounds to change its mind. Positions that were stable at 3 rounds may not be at 12.
• A different framing of the question brings out different topics and different positions. Use Compare to put two framings side by side.
• Adding a source gives the panel something to cite. A claim with no source is marked as a gap.

Comparing two framings

Run the same group on the question framed two ways, then open Compare from the report. It shows each report beside the other, with how many topics split, settled too quickly or rested on thin evidence, and lists the positions that appear in only one framing. In the hall example, the roof-or-solar framing and the "what keeps the hall open for twenty years" framing may surface different risks.

What it does not do

• It does not tell you what to decide.
• It does not stand in for your members. The panel is made of synthetic seats that rehearse an argument. It is not a measure of what the community thinks.
• It does not record a decision. Decisions are made and recorded in the Deliberation Village.

Help on every step

Each step has a short help panel under the step list, in plain words or with more detail. Your choice is remembered on your device.

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