Hundreds Gather in San Mateo County to Discuss Affordable Housing

The “Threshold 2008” citizen engagement campaign launched on March 15-16 with a Deliberative Poll held at La Cañada College in Redwood City. Over 200 pre-selected and statistically representative citizens from throughout San Mateo County met to discuss the status of affordable housing in their county.

The Deliberative Poll is an engagement methodology developed by Dr. Jim Fishkin at Stanford’s Center for Deliberative Democracy. It involves the assemblage of a statistically representative group of citizens who take an introductory survey about a given topic – in this case it was housing in San Mateo County. The participants are then involved in a series of small group deliberation groups (8-10 people) and large group plenary sessions where experts on housing from a range of viewpoints answered audience questions.

What makes “Threshold 2008” such an interesting campaign is that the Deliberative Poll is just the first of three efforts to involve the citizens of San Mateo County in a larger conversation about housing. The next step goes online, as a number of facilitated “Online Dialogues” is expected to gather over 1,000 San Mateans in this discussion. Following these, the results of both the Deliberative Poll and Online Dialogues will become a part of dozens of “community conversations” throughout San Mateo County, as information materials and trained local facilitators will conduct deliberative sessions in their local communities. Viewpoint Learning out of San Diego coordinates these last two stages.

An historic effort to engage California’s citizens in policy-making is underway and we look forward to seeing the results!