The Louisville Civic Assembly

In February 2020, 89.3 WFPL News in Louisville and  The American Assembly at Columbia University conducted The Next Louisville: Civic Assembly, a community-driven virtual conversation. The goal was to  explore the issues that matter most in Louisville — and to identify potential solutions.

The Civic Assembly was conducted with an online tool called Polis, which allows participants to make and respond to each other’s brief statements. The result is a community-directed survey of opinion and also a loose dialogue as participants respond to statements with new submissions of their own. The only direction was a framing question: “What do you believe should change in Louisville to make it a better place to live, work and spend time?”

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The Bowling Green Civic Assembly Report

Over 2,000 people participated in our 'Pol.is' online civic conversation in Bowling Green, Kentucky.  Together they submitted over 600 statements and voted nearly a quarter-million times.  These statements dealt with divisive issues such as immigration and LGBTQ rights, but overwhelmingly, the things people wanted to talk about were things about which people agreed.  People agreed about traffic and local development, about the need for improved community and commercial services, about government accountability, job training, and education.  This report explores the Bowling Green results and explains the methodology.

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