ASSEMBLE
How can we reinvigorate democratic participation while helping governments make better decisions — and do it with a sustainable business model?
0→1 Product Leadership
UX Research & Interviews
AI-Driven Insight Synthesis
UX/UI Design & Rapid Prototyping
Stakeholder Alignment
DemocracyOS
DemocracyOS is a pilot program and product concept designed to transform the complex process of creating a citizens' assembly into an intuitive, educational, and shareable experience. By making it easier for civic leaders and advocates to plan and propose these powerful democratic tools, Assemble aims to accelerate their adoption worldwide.
PROBLEM
Citizens' assemblies — supercharged juries to solve hard public problems — are gaining traction globally as a viable and replicable antidote to the distrust and dysfunction so inherent to modern politics. There are several key frictions standing in the way: lack of understanding, cost of planning and implementation.
SOLUTION
Our team designed a concept that would promise to
MY ROLE
Project & Design Lead
IMPACT
Project & Design Lead
TEAM
Process Design Lead, Technical Advisor, Global Advisory Group (25+ leaders in the deliberative democracy field)
The Problem
The advocacy group I started with, Democracy Creative, had a mission to help governments implement citizens' assemblies—a powerful tool for solving contentious public policy issues. However, our mission faced a fundamental scaling problem.
The Business Problem: Advocating for and planning a citizens' assembly was a manual, bespoke, and resource-intensive process. Each new engagement with a city or state leader required weeks of custom preparation. This high operational friction created a major bottleneck, severely limiting the rate at which our partners could achieve their: making citizens' assemblies a common feature of modern democracy.
475 Hours
Estimated time investment it takes on average to get a citizens' assembly
$30,000
Estimated time investment it takes on average to get a citizens' assembly
The User Problem: Our primary users — elected officials and civic leaders — are extremely time-poor and operate in complex political environments. They are faced daily with hard public problems, and are very interested in ways to solve them effectively and in a way that their communities will feel good about. While citizens' assemblies are one powerful tool to help, many civic leaders initially found the idea abstract and difficult to act upon. They lacked a tool to quickly grasp the concept, explore its possibilities for their community, and build the necessary internal consensus with their colleagues to move a proposal forward.
We needed to transform a high-friction, consultative service into a low-friction, self-serve product.
The Process
The idea for Assemble grew out of 100's of conversations held over the course of work at Democracy Creative — both with civic leaders who could potentially convene a citizens' assembly for their community, and with other advocates and practitioner orgs of citizens' assemblies. In this case, that work gave our team, who was immersed in this world and doing that advocacy work, a solid understanding of the problem: because we wereliving it day-to-day. We were hearing comments like:
"So what are the next steps? How much is this going to cost, and what can we expect the outcome will be?"
👦🏽
Mayor
in a small US City
"We spend hundreds of hours manually building the same foundational plans for every new city."
👦🏽
Practitioner
Citizens' Assemblies
"I'd like to understand how all the variables are connected. If the timeline extends by three weeks, what does that do to our facilitator costs? Does more participants change the recruitment budget?"
👦🏽
Advocate
Citizens' Assemblies
"The idea intriguing, but I have to sell this to eight other council members and a city manager."
👦🏽
City Councilor
in a small US City
All this feedback pointed to the same hypothesis: an intuitive, easy to use tool to lay out preliminary plans for a citizens' assembly would be a vital contribution to this field. Because it could be designed to both lighten the load of practitioners who were writing long complex plans and crunching numbers for hours before every potential meeting, and it could be designed in a way that would help curious civic leaders and community organizers come up with their own realistic plans too, learning about the nuts and bolts of a citizens' assembly along the way.
If we were to design a tool that would help people understand, envision, and plan citizen's assemblies in a radically intuitive way, our first significant challenge became clear:
How do we visually communicate the important factors of a citizens' assembly in a way that is as easy to understand as possible?
The Critical First Step:
Develop a Visual Language To Represent a Citizens' Assembly Plan
We knew the product revolved around this visual representation, and so we spent many hours refining and iterating breaking down the assembly into it's component parts, so we can organize them and group them together in a visual language that spoke to its essence.
What emerged after many rounds of distillation, iteration, and consultation with our target users was the simple 4 part wheel, showing the four foundational parts of a successful citizens' assembly:
The participants (like a jury) and how they are selected
The facilitation
The learning, and what
The process all those ingredients go through
Discovery and a Key Pivot
Initial conversations with advisors and potential users revealed a critical early obstacle we hadn't anticipated: users didn't even know where to start. Choosing a suitable topic for an assembly was a major hurdle.
This insight led to a crucial pivot. Instead of just presenting a blank slate, we designed an AI-powered wizard. A user could enter their city or address, and the tool would analyze local news and data to suggest relevant, high-impact topics (e.g., "housing affordability," "transportation infrastructure," "climate resilience"). This immediately lowered the barrier to entry and sparked the user's imagination.
The Big Trade-Off: Mission vs. Sustainability
As a non-profit project, we were mission-driven. But to be viable, we needed to be self-sustaining, not perpetually grant-dependent. This forced a difficult strategic trade-off. We designed the core planning tool to be free and open, fulfilling our mission. To generate revenue, we designed Assemble to act as a qualified lead generator for practitioner organizations—the expert groups that physically run assemblies.
Once a user designed their ideal assembly, they would be connected to a pre-vetted practitioner in their region who could help them implement it. These partners would pay a fee to be the exclusive "endpoint" for leads in their territory, creating a sustainable business model that funded the free tool.
We designed a hybrid business model that balanced a non-profit mission with SaaS principles. The free-to-use planning tool drove adoption and social good, while a B2B lead-generation feature for implementation partners created a clear path to revenue and long-term sustainability.
Designing a Tangible Blueprint
Given our funding constraints, our goal was not to build a full-scale product immediately, but to create a high-fidelity prototype that served as a tangible blueprint. This artifact was the core of our work. I collaborated closely with our technical advisor to ensure every feature was designed with feasibility in mind. The design process focused on distilling the most complex aspects of an assembly—like sortition (random selection) and deliberation structure—into simple, visual, and interactive components.
Creating a Seamless and Coherent Brand
The distilled citizens' assembly wheel, when stripped down to its most bare form, presented a compelling logo. This tied the entire them together.
The Outcome
While the project ultimately did not proceed to a full build due to a challenging funding climate for non-profits, Assemble succeeded in creating a powerful strategic asset that influenced the entire field.
The Result: We delivered a high-fidelity prototype and a comprehensive strategic plan that served as a definitive blueprint for solving the industry's scaling problem. The project moved the conversation from "if" to "how." The visual frameworks and distillations we created were widely shared and have been used by other advocates to more clearly explain the citizens' assembly process.
The Impact: Instead of achieving user-based KPIs, the project's impact was conceptual. We established a clear, product-led vision for how to grow the movement, complete with a viable business model. Several organizations inspired by this work are now exploring how to build similar platforms.
The primary outcome was a strategic blueprint that unified product design, user needs, and a sustainable business model. This work provided a clear, actionable vision that de-risked future investment and inspired new initiatives within the democracy-building community.
The Learning: Start Smaller to Go Faster
If I were to start this project again today, my approach would be to de-risk the technical effort even earlier. Instead of designing a comprehensive prototype to attract a large funding round, I would have focused all initial energy on recruiting a volunteer developer to build just one micro-feature—the most basic version of the assembly planner. By launching a radically simplified MVP, we could have generated real-world traction and momentum, making the subsequent fundraising effort far more compelling.
My key takeaway was the strategic value of radical incrementalism. Proving value with a small, live product, even if imperfect, is more powerful than a perfect plan. This experience solidified my belief in lean, iterative development to build momentum and validate assumptions with minimal resources.
jessepwarren@gmail.com