Initial set of top civic issues

After running a modest number of mini assemblies, the most frequently raised civic issues not receiving adequate attention from the civic government have been collected below and arranged into a word cloud where

• text size is proportional to frequency raised
• topics are grouped by theme

Some of the issues raised span multiple themes and are clearly interrelated - for example mental health and addiction, crime and public safety. Similarly environmental issues bump up against social well-being and democratic governance.

As we scale up our mini assembly process, with lessons learned from our first trials, we will solidify our identification of the "top issues" facing the city and begin exploring potential solutions, which will in turn shed light on the experts and stakeholders we will need for the city's future official citizens' assemblies.

Its interesting to compare our findings with those of similar processes that claim to capture public concerns. The table below compares and contrasts our initial findings with polling of the public by City News.

Issues are ordered top to bottom based on their combined rank (1st, 2nd, ...) across the two sources while those issues voiced in both processes are shown in bold font and are centred.

Agreement on the top issues is apparent, but as we move further down the list there is less agreement. There are a number of potential reasons for this disagreement:

• The issues identified in the City News poll were fixed, ie respondents were asked to choose from a list generated by that organization. In our mini assemblies, any issue can be raised by participants.
• Only the top 3 (we're considering switching to 5) issues were captured in each mini assembly - the longer list was collated across multiple assemblies.
• The mini-assembly process specifically focuses on issues that respondents see as areas that require increased government attention. Areas that are being adequately addressed are thus not generally raised as "top issues".
• The participant sampling processes for the two sources are quite different - our initial mini assembly recruitment has been by word of mouth and has not yet grown sufficiently to fully escape potential selection bias. We'll discuss this further in an upcoming post.