Our

Debate Scheduling

Approach

What is Our Approach to

Open Assembly Scheduling

An open assembly is an assembly that is open to the public to contribute to or participate in; which is what the Citizen Assembly operates.

How do we manage the number of participants, if any and every person or entity can contribute to debates in the Assembly?

The Citizen Assembly schedules debates according to provisions of Section 7.5.5 of the First Democratic Constitution, which already solved this problem. The process laid out in this section is what we call the Open Assembly Scheduling System.

It is designed to ensure that, regardless of the size of the country or its population, while any and every person is invited to contribute to legislative debates in the country, we are still able to fairly or without discrimination, access the best propositions in the country for debate, without getting overwhelmed with the numbers.

A summary of the debate scheduling approach is provided below. For a detailed list of provisions under this approach, you can download a FREE copy of the First Democratic Constitution of Ghana published by The Future of Governance (tfog.org).

Download Guide (FREE)
Summary of

Debate Scheduling

  • A citizen submits to the Assembly, a proposal for a new policy, law, or institution, structure or system for governance, or for the reform of an existing one, through the Assembly's portal.
  • The submission system removes spam, badly structured or plagiarised proposals.
  • Proposals are continually catalogued by the Assembly's secretariat into appropriate sectors and topics
  • Any citizen may view the list of pending proposals and counter or seek to join a particular proposal.
  • The Assembly's secretariat schedules qualified proposals for debate according to a time-table.
  • If the number of parties qualified to debate a topic are too many for a national Citizen Assembly to handle, control is transferred to a level below that where the number of debating parties is manageable; that is, transferring debate to the substate (or regional), district, town or neighbourhood level, where parties can debate it out and move up in levels until the debate returns to the national level for a final debate.