Choosing tools for bigger rooms

If you’re past a dinner table and thinking about a bigger room — an online assembly, a citywide conversation, a standing space for a community that wants one — here’s what 86 deliberation and civic-tech tools actually offer, checked live in August 2026, not copied from an old list.

What we checked, and how it held up

We started from a wide survey of the field and re-checked every live claim a few weeks later. Most of it held up. A few things changed enough to matter, and they’re worth knowing if you’re choosing a tool yourself:

• Polis is the platform behind our own Toronto pilot and the tool we recommend first for opinion-mapping at scale — free, open-source, and the one used by Taiwan and Barcelona at national and city scale. Talk to the City (an open project; Taiwan’s digital ministry runs a national instance) is the strongest free option for clustering open-ended written text.
• Decidim and CONSUL are real, capable platforms — but built for multi-week participatory-governance processes, not a single room's evening. Decidim's hosted option (Voca.city) also isn't free: its assembly module runs about €350/month.
• Your Priorities (the Citizens Foundation) turned out to be under-recognized: free, hosted, genuinely self-serve the same day, open source, and ranked #1 in People Powered's 2025 digital-participation ratings. If your community wants a standing online space between gatherings, this is our pick.
• Consider.it is currently in a pilot/relaunch limbo with no free tier — hold off. Loomio, which used to be free, now costs $299–399/year — worth knowing before you build a plan around it.
• On methods and facilitation rather than software: MASS LBP remains the standard reference for a genuine citizens'-assembly-grade process. DemocracyNext's free Assembling an Assembly Guide, MosaicLab's free facilitation guide, and newDemocracy's paper on online deliberation are all worth reading before you run anything bigger than a room.

The simple answer for an online assembly

The question we kept getting: is there an easily adoptable online platform for hosting a citizens’ assembly, today, for free? The honest, live-checked answer is yes — and it’s mostly not a platform at all.

Every purpose-built video-deliberation tool we found fails the same-day test. Stanford's Online Deliberation Platform is access-by-request only, a research partnership with no public pricing or self-serve path. Frankly, built at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center, open-source, with “citizens' assemblies” as a named use case, is the closest purpose-built match we found — but it's in closed beta, request-access only, not something you can pick up this week.

The other well-known names — Decidim, CONSUL, Loomio, Kialo, Harmonica — each do a genuinely different job than a live mini-assembly. And the field's own research is blunt about the obvious shortcut: bundling a citizens' assembly onto a generic video call, unmodified, tends to underperform — unless the facilitation itself is redesigned for the medium.

So the simple answer is this: any video call your room already uses, plus a shared document, plus a facilitation technique actually redesigned for the medium — which is exactly what a kit is. We built one: the Online Annex, one page translating an in-person assembly kit onto a video call — mixed breakout rooms, private silent voting by direct message, a shared-document three-column wall, no new platform, no cost, runnable tonight.

If your community wants a standing online space to keep talking between live gatherings, Your Priorities is the free, hosted, self-serve option we'd point you to — you run it in your own name; we host nothing for anyone. And if a room genuinely outgrows all of this, the next steps up are the Frankly beta (once open), a practitioner working at MASS LBP's level for a true civic-lottery process, or Decidim/CONSUL if a partner institution is running a real multi-week process and paying for its own infrastructure.

More kits, and a stop line

A kit shelf works because it stays short — every kit added dilutes the ones that matter. Since this evaluation, three more kits shipped, bringing the shelf to ten: the Futures Hour for a classroom, the Online Annex above, and the Complaint Clinic for a folding table in a lobby people already pass through.

A few more are possible, built only when a host actually asks for them rather than staged ahead of demand: a World Café or Open Space one-pager, a “solutions safari” format for touring solutions that already work elsewhere, a game-night format for practicing group decisions, and a walking-audit format for surfacing a neighbourhood's own repair backlog.

Some things we’re deliberately not building, with the reasons on the record rather than left silent:

• A Deliberative Polling kit — it's a trademarked method whose validity depends on stratified sampling and balanced briefings that a lay-run room can't honestly deliver. The assembly kit's own honesty box already names this limit rather than pretending around it.
• A civic-lottery / sortition kit — selection science is the genuinely hard part of a real citizens' assembly; we'd rather point you to a practitioner who does it properly than ship a kit that fakes the hard part.
• A participatory-budgeting kit — until a room actually controls a real budget line, a participatory-budgeting night violates the basic rule every kit here follows: a real question with a real recipient on the other end.
• Any governance-futures kit (liquid democracy, recall, sortition chambers) — these are structural changes bigger than a room-level kit can responsibly carry.