Run your first assembly
The five modules taught the craft. This session is where your group uses it — once, end to end, on a question deliberately chosen to be safe to get wrong. In 60 to 90 minutes you will run one complete assembly, from a locked proposal to a sealed record, and leave with two artefacts: the completed record of your first assembly, and a filled-in Debrief Sheet that tells you what to adjust before your first real decision.
There are two ways to run it, and they carry equal standing:
Before you book the hour — readiness self-check
Run through this before the session, not at the start of it. Every "no" is cheap to fix a day early and expensive to discover with six people around the table.
Readiness self-check
| Ready when… | Yes / No |
|---|---|
| The proposer and the facilitator have both worked through the Primer and Modules 1–5. (Everyone having read the Primer helps, but is not required.) | |
| Paper mode: the six templates are printed — one Proposal Form, one Position Card sheet per member, one Tracker, one Poll Sheet, dissent slips, one Checklist. On-Village mode: every member can sign in, and someone has clicked through the demo once. | |
| You are using the practice question below, or one equally low-stakes and reversible. (Not a live wound — see the warning.) | |
| The decision rule and quorum are written down before the session — not negotiated in it. | |
| Roles are assigned: proposer, facilitator, recorder, members. Four people is the minimum viable room. | |
| You have 60–90 minutes with an agreed hard stop. | |
| One named person owns the record after the session ends. |
The practice question
Use this one unless you have a better candidate that is equally neutral, low-stakes, and reversible. It is dull on purpose — and it still produces genuine positions, a genuine amendment or two, and usually at least one genuine objection, which is exactly what you need.
Pre-baked Proposal Form entries
| Title | Move our regular meeting to start 30 minutes earlier for the next three months, reverting automatically after that. |
|---|---|
| Who decides | Everyone in the room today. |
| Quorum | Everyone who agreed to attend this session — you are the quorum. |
| Deliberation window | The 20–30 minute deliberation step of this session. |
| Poll closes | When the facilitator calls the poll step — announced at the open. |
| Decision rule | Consent poll: adopted when objections, once heard and answered, number fewer than a fifth of votes cast. |
| Sunset | Reverts automatically after three months unless renewed by a fresh decision. |
Why this question works: everyone in the room has standing (it is their evening being moved), the stakes are real but small, and the sunset makes it self-reversing — a wrong call costs the group three months of mild inconvenience, then undoes itself. If your group genuinely has no regular meeting time to move, substitute something of the same shape: where to hold the end-of-season shared meal, whether to swap the newsletter from monthly to fortnightly for a quarter. Same tests: could a reasonable person vote no, and can everyone afford to lose?
Roles
Four roles, four people minimum
- Proposer — fills in the Proposal Form (or adopts the pre-baked one and puts their name to it), answers questions about it during deliberation, and defends nothing after the poll opens. The proposer does not chair.
- Facilitator — makes the three legitimate moves and observes the three hard limits from Module 2: name where the room agrees, name where it divides, name amendments as they form; draft nothing into the ballot, weigh nothing, cast no vote. The facilitator guide has the session-running detail.
- Recorder — keeps the Tracker, runs the count on the Poll Sheet, takes dissent slips verbatim, and owns the sealing step. The recorder votes; recording is bookkeeping, not chairing.
- Members — everyone, including the above where roles double up. One doubling is forbidden: the proposer may not facilitate.
The script — six steps, 65–90 minutes
Each step uses one template from the paper kit and matches one stage of the demo decision, so anyone unsure what a step should look like can watch Fernside do it first. On-Village mode follows the identical sequence — the templates become screens, the sequence stays the same.
Step 1 · Frame and lock the proposal — 10 min
Template 1: Proposal Form · demo stage 1 →
The proposer reads the Proposal Form aloud, field by field. The room may sharpen the wording now — this is the last moment the terms of the contest can move. When the form is complete, the facilitator declares it locked and reads the decision sentence back one final time. From here, arguments may change minds, but not the question, the rule, the quorum, or the close.
Step 2 · Positions before speech — 10 min
Template 2: Position Cards (Card A) · demo stage 2 →
In silence, every member fills in Card A: a stance, a one-sentence position, and the reasoning under it. Nobody speaks until every pen is down. This is the step that gives the quiet members the same start as the quick ones — do not let anyone talk their card instead of writing it. Then each member reads their own card aloud, uninterrupted, in any order the facilitator calls.
Step 3 · Deliberate — 20–30 min
Template 3: Common-Ground & Amendments Tracker · demo stage 2 →
Open discussion, mirrored by the facilitator: where the room agrees, where it actually divides, which amendments are forming. The recorder keeps the Tracker where everyone can see it, and every line on it must trace to something a member wrote or said. Members who move fill in Card B, naming what moved them. Five minutes before the close, the facilitator reads the final wording — proposal plus folded-in amendments — back to the room from the Tracker.
Step 4 · The poll — 10 min
Template 4: Consent Poll Sheet · demo stage 3 →
The recorder copies the final wording onto the Poll Sheet and checks quorum. Each member gives one of the four responses — agree, agree with reservations, stand aside, object — and the count happens in the open, all four totals announced in the same breath. The recorder applies the written rule with the arithmetic shown. Adopted, not adopted, or referred back: the sheet says which, and shows why.
Step 5 · Dissent onto the record — 5–10 min
Template 5: Dissent Record Slip · demo stage 4 →
Every objector — whether the proposal passed or failed — fills in a slip in their own words and signs it. Nobody paraphrases, nobody tidies. The recorder countersigns each slip and attaches it to the record. If your practice run produced no objections, note that on the Poll Sheet and move on; do not manufacture one. (But if someone voted "agree with reservations", their reservations still get written down — that is the Poll Sheet's job.)
Step 6 · Seal the record — 10 min
Template 6: Record & Verification Checklist · demo stage 5 →
Paper mode: the recorder assembles the pieces, works down Part A of the Checklist (is the record complete?), then Part B: the full record is read back to the room, the proposer and facilitator sign and date every page, at least one objector signs to confirm their words appear unaltered, and dated copies go to several hands — not one drawer. That read-back, those signatures, and those dates are the seal.
On-Village mode: the recorder seals the record — hashed and signed with the group's key — works down Part C of the Checklist, exports the signed file, and at least one member verifies it on a machine the group does not run. Same completeness test, same discipline; the difference is that the seal can now be checked by someone who was never in the room.
The Debrief Sheet — fill it in before anyone leaves
Ten minutes, while it is fresh. The debrief is not a satisfaction survey; it is the bridge between the practice run and your first real decision, and its last line is a commitment.
Debrief Sheet
1 · Did the question survive contact? Did anyone discover mid-deliberation that they were deciding something other than what they thought?
2 · Did any position move? What moved it — an argument, an amendment, or just fatigue?
3 · Read any dissent slips back to their authors: are those their words, exactly?
4 · The stranger test: could someone who wasn't in the room reconstruct the decision — and the disagreement — from the record alone?
5 · Which step ran long, which ran short, and what will you change before the first real decision?
6 · Our first real question, in one decidable sentence — and the date we will file it
Where to from here
Run your first real decision within the month. If the paper kit serves your group well, keep using it — it will not wear out, and nothing in this course expires with it. If your decisions start needing to be checked by people far from the room — members who moved away, a federation of rooms, an auditor, your own group ten years on — that is the job Village Assembly was built for, and the optional extension module covers what changes when one room becomes many. The craft you practised today is the same in both worlds.