CivicMill
Could the people buying bread and cheese on Capitol Square make a better decision than the lawmakers in the building across the street? Every Saturday we give them the chance to find out.
We take a real decision the Wisconsin State Capitol has already made, with the vote cast and the results on the record, and put it to whoever stops at our stall at the Dane County Farmers' Market in Madison. We don't say which way the vote went. By the end of the day a noticeboard covered in sticky notes has reached its own answer, and we set it beside what the Capitol actually did.
We do this because a lot of people have stopped believing the system works for them, and it's easy to see why. The big decisions are made by a handful of elected officials who need large sums of money to win their seats and keep them, and every debate arrives with a team we've been taught to distrust. The people who live with the results are rarely in the room when the choice is made.
Sortition USA believes that everyday citizens, given a fair process, can make decisions as wise as the ones made on their behalf, and sometimes wiser. You don't need to be eloquent, well connected or an expert. You need to be heard, and to listen in return. Take the party labels off the ideas and people turn out to be far more open-minded than the news would have us think. Democracies around the world are already putting ordinary citizens at the heart of hard decisions through citizens' assemblies. The Saturday Board is a small, public way to try the same thing, one visitor at a time.
A visit takes about five minutes, and nobody runs the discussion. You begin by writing down what worries you about the question, and your worry goes up on a wall where everyone can see it. Then, before reading anyone else's ideas, you write your own first answer and file it beside the ideas it's most like. Where it goes is your call and nobody else's. Last, you look over everyone's worries and mark any idea you think would make someone else's problem worse. When enough people mark an idea, it comes down. At closing time the board's answer is the idea with the most support gathered around it, which can beat the single tallest pile of notes.
Our first board took on the Foxconn deal. You can read what the market came up with, and how it compares with what really happened, in the report below. If you're in Madison on a Saturday, come and add a note. If you'd like to run a board of your own, everything you need is on this page.
Open the CivicMill Board → Turn a photograph of a finished board into data you can score and share. Runs in your browser; nothing to install.Run a board
- Field guideThe board, the visit step by step, and how the answer is read.
- Steward's guideWhat to say, what to watch, and what to mark.
- Steward's logThe printable tally sheets for the day.
The questions
- The Madison DocketNine decisions from the Wisconsin Capitol, as the issue cards visitors are given. Each background brief is published after its Saturday.
Boards we have run
- The Foxconn DecisionSaturday 5 September 2026 · Capitol Square, Madison