Page 111 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

How long are the days? What is normal where you live? Days are roughly the length of a working day. This depends on what is possible, how many meetings are happening and what content is being covered. It is common to have a weekday evening ‘meet-and-greet’session where participants meet one another,the facilitators and the sponsoring agency before stepping in to full day sessions for the rest of the process. What matters here is that participants have enough time face-to-face to ask a lot of questions, receive and think about answers, discuss things with experts (some of whom they choose), explore information, form recommendations and write their own report.This means that a process could have three 3-hour sessions and two full-day sessions and still find the right balance between information exploration, deliberation and recommendation forming. The important factor is that citizens feel sufficiently informed and had enough of a chance to discuss it that they ‘own’ the decision. It will be generally be above 30 hours. 109