How to take part

• Online [Zoom]: Register to join online

What is the Massembly?

A giant community assembly, a mass assembly: the Massembly!

This is a UK-wide online assembly, where everyone will be welcome.  It’s a continuation of our incredible Massembly at Upgrade Democracy, where over 450 people took part. Now we’re taking it further! Let’s keep up the momentum around assemblies and keep on demonstrating how things can be done differently. Assemblies are now regularly in the media and being looked at by politicians. Let’s ensure their relevance more widely.

At the Massembly, we’ll be asking the question:

“How might we take meaningful steps to Upgrade Democracy?”

In small groups, you will explore alternative ways of doing democracy together, as we strive for a fairer and more inclusive system.

How will it work?

In the Zoom, everyone will receive two links – one to the Instructions which explain how the small group assembly facilitator takes us through the process. And another to the Information Cards.

The Information Cards describe the different kinds of democracy or political systems we are already seeing around the world. We’ll discuss these in our small groups.

Reading the Information Cards in advance really helps with understanding the process and information discussed during the assembly!

Information Cards 

Steps

The Zoom meeting host will introduce the overall assembly and then we’ll form small groups of six in Breakout Rooms and introduce ourselves.

Those who’ve trained or feel confident will have identified themselves as assembly facilitators. The small groups will either have one allocated to their group or you can nominate one from within your group. The group will also need to nominate a note-taker and time keeper.

Your small group assembly facilitator will use the Instructions to guide the group through a discussion on different types of democratic processes. Everyone in the group can suggest ideas for upgrading democracy, which the group will also discuss.

The small group then identifies their best three ideas and one person then submits these to an online tool called Pol.is.

Pol.is allows everyone taking part in the assembly to vote on these ideas so we will start seeing trends of which ideas are the most popular. We will use these results to help inform our thinking and plans for taking upgrade democracy forwards.

Polis is a real-time system for gathering, analysing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words.

What should I bring or prepare?

You can bring a pen or pencil and some paper or some other means of taking notes (not essential) and a smartphone (not essential but you can use this to vote whilst you use Zoom on your computer).

We encourage everyone to promote this open Massembly event to allies and ‘opposers’ alike!  It will take everyone to bring systemic change.

View the Summary of Results from our last Massembly ~ Saturday 31st August in Windsor