The Listen playbook
Anyone can promise to listen. This playbook is how a candidate demonstrates it before voting day, with receipts: real consultation sessions run in your own room under your own name, a standing platform your constituents can actually reach you on, and a published record of what you heard. Free and identical for every candidate and team in every race in Ontario’s 2026 municipal elections.
The assembly — one room, one evening, a real question
The whole workflow already exists as a free kit: the Citizens’ Assembly in a Box — one evening, 12 to 30 people, mixed tables, independent input before discussion, disagreement recorded instead of voted away. Candidates run it exactly the way any host does, with three adaptations:
- Your name on the door. A candidate assembly is convened by your campaign, in a room you arranged, and it says so. Nothing behind this kit convenes, attends, or co-signs your session.
- The honest floor travels with the kit. An evening’s room speaks for the people in that room — never for the ward, and never for “the people.” Say it at the start; print it on the record. A candidate who claims a room of twenty as a mandate has misread the exercise.
- Pick a question you don’t control the answer to. The kit’s question discipline applies doubly to candidates: a session designed to produce applause for your platform is a rally, not a consultation, and readers can tell the difference.
The kit’s harvest standard — how to record what the room said, dissent included — is offered, never required. Use ours, use your own, but publish something: an unpublished consultation is indistinguishable from one that never happened.
The listening KPIs
Four definitions, published identically for everyone. What we publish is the definitions; the numbers are yours to earn and publish on your own page:
- Sessions held — consultation events actually run, dated and place-named. Any honest format counts: an assembly, a town hall, a listening table at a market. A leaflet drop is not a session.
- Attendance — people in the room, counted at the door, per session. Count once, at the time; never estimate afterward.
- Questions answered on the record — questions from constituents you have answered in writing or on camera, where the question and the answer are both public. (The citizen question bank is one ready-made source, identical for every candidate; any public question counts.)
- What-we-heard notes published — a written note after each session: what was asked, what was said, where it disagreed with you, published where your constituents can read it. This is the receipt that separates listening from being seen listening.
A standing platform — the honest table
A campaign that vanishes after October has demonstrated nothing. A standing constituent platform — a place your constituents can reach you, all term — is a listening receipt that keeps renewing. No platform is required, none is endorsed, and every common choice has real trade-offs, so here they are, plainly. Vendor terms change; check the current ones before you commit.
| Platform | Best fit | The honest trade-offs |
|---|---|---|
| Discord | An open constituent space | Free, joinable by link, real moderation tooling (roles, channels, audit log). Skews younger; older constituents may need a walkthrough. A public server is discoverable — which is the point, and also the moderation load. |
| Signal | Organizing your own crew | Private, end-to-end encrypted, no ads, no data harvesting. Group size is capped and there is no public discovery — by design. The right tool for coordinating volunteers; the wrong tool for an open constituent space, precisely because nobody can find it. |
| Slack | Flagged — read this first | Comfortable for anyone who works in an office, but on the free tier your older messages become inaccessible as the archive fills — which makes it a poor public record: a constituent space whose history evaporates undercuts the receipt this playbook is about. Paid tiers fix that, at a real monthly cost. |
| Meeting people where they are | Very widely installed across ages and languages — often the honest answer to “where are my constituents already?” Moderation tooling is thin, large communities are hard to keep civil, and it is Meta-owned — its data practices are its own and worth reading before you route constituents there. | |
| Facebook Groups | Where many wards already talk | Many neighbourhoods effectively already live here, and discovery is strong. What members see is ranked by feed algorithms rather than shown plainly, moderation is a real ongoing job, and the same Meta data practices apply. Fine as a meeting place; weak as a record. |
Whatever you choose, publish the choice as part of your receipts: where the space lives, how a constituent joins it, and who runs it.
The safety floor — rides every space, non-negotiable
- A named moderator. A human being, named on the space itself, who is responsible for what the space tolerates. “The community moderates itself” is how spaces rot.
- A minors policy, stated up front. The simple default: your constituent space is for adults, 18-plus, unless you have deliberately built otherwise — and a space that welcomes teenagers needs its own rules, written down: no one-to-one private contact between the campaign and a minor, guardian awareness for participation, and no photos of identifiable minors without a guardian’s okay. If you haven’t done that work, run an 18-plus space and say so.
- A code of conduct, posted where people enter. Short is fine: what gets a warning, what gets removal, who decides, how to appeal. Ours is free to copy from any of the kits and reword as your own — your space, your name, our template if you want it.
Publish your receipts
Sessions, attendance, answered questions, what-we-heard notes — all of it belongs on your own page, under your own name, standing for the whole term you’re asking to serve. That’s the entire mechanism: receipts your constituents and your local press can check for themselves. Nothing flows back to us — no submissions, no registry, no scoreboard here. The comparing belongs to your constituents and the press, which is exactly where it should be.