 All right, so thank you for joining my story from here today. Before I continue, I acknowledge that I'm joining today's event from the lands of the Coverage Barber people of Daruwa country. I'd also like to acknowledge that the teaching and learning of Western Sydney University occurs across many parts of this beautiful country, including, but not limited to the lands of the Daruwa, Yorah, Gandangara, Bungalong, and Rurajiri nations. We also acknowledge that the teaching and learning currently delivered across our campuses is a continuance of the teaching and learning that's occurred on these lands for tens of thousands of years. These lands were never seeded, and to this day, Stornow Tree has been agreed to. I would like to pay my respect to Elders Past and Present, and I thank them for the custodianship and leadership on these lands and extend a welcome and acknowledgement to any Indigenous Australians joining my presentation today. So how could a lottery, how could a lottery, snail mail, and Osher Ginsburg in a bath improve student voice at Western Sydney University? Today, I'm going to give you an insight into the process of engaging a citizen's assembly, comprised of students who are asked to provide a series of recommendations to answer the question, how should students have a voice at Western Sydney University? Hopefully you leave this talk with at least a formative understanding of the benefits of running a process like this and take away some of my recommendations if you should seek to implement one yourself in your institution, organisation, or community. So there it is. What is a citizen's assembly you might be asking? So a lottery is conducted essentially to bring together a group of citizens within their population. The group, aka a mini-public, are exposed to the central issue or question, which is obviously predetermined, and then are guided through a structure which supports accessible information acquisition for a diverse range of people who are then empowered to brainstorm and negotiate ideas around solutions to problem provided. The facilitation of the assembly process is done so that all voices are heard as equally as possible, and that all ideas are given the opportunity that the majority are able to say yes or no to bringing any ideas to the surface after ample opportunity is provided for the robust weighing up of these ideas very much. Now, Jean-Claude. We can perhaps imagine this process being akin to a civic planning session with everyday citizens like you or me rather than politicians, high-paid executives, or other people with a large amount of social, financial, and political capital. If you've not seen the Osher Ginsburg video to explain the position of the folks within change politics, the initiative of New Democracy, I encourage you to look that up as he explains what the Citizens Assembly can offer to a democratic environment in terms of empowering the general public and the movement toward intrinsic motivations as opposed to extrinsic motivations or personal in-group gain. So as a brief aside, I really enjoy the parallels that we can draw from this work to Dr. Clemente's work, conceptualizing, drawing on the work of Bandura that we heard from yesterday, but also as recent as today, hearing from LaVice's work on ASP, and Kilian Kien's work just earlier on partnership and self-determination, particularly in the First Nations communities. I'm sure I would be speaking about the same for Aidan's presentation for yesterday afternoon with SBA members had I not needed to be evacuated from the building I was occupying. So apologies for missing that. But yeah, just wanted to acknowledge the great work that everyone else is doing. And I'm really thankful for being a part of all of this. So reflectivity, agency, ambassadorship, civic participation and the studentship that ultimately this opportunity has provided. I think, yeah, it leads us onward. So you can hear more about how New Democracy, the foundation that we work with, that's our partner organization in this whole entire process, that's sort of more or less the mastermind, about how they're documenting and often assisting, like in our case, the facilitation of examples of citizens assemblies. So there's many examples I could probably draw on. I won't go into many detail. I really encourage you to look those up. But Melbourne City, Byron Bay, the ACT, I think there was even some examples from Western Australia that I wasn't even aware of until like just a moment ago, I was just sort of doing some pre-presentation kind of Googling and making sure I'm really sort of across everything. Even abroad in Ireland, Norway, and yeah, just so many examples. I really wish that I had sort of reconfigured this presentation to provide you a bit of a comprehensive table of these examples. Maybe that's something that I can look into doing later on down the track. But yeah, so yeah, you can also tune in to a condensed sort of explanation. And I really consider, you also tune into that. I've got a QR code link there for that to the Life Matters episode on ABC Radio National. What I will do for you now is hopefully we've got this working. It's only similar to a citizen's jury in that you're getting a mix of everyday people to influence a decision. Really, citizens assemblies, so they bring a mix of people together, but they're also, they're chosen by lottery, like they would be a jury, but they're stratified, which means that they're going to be a broad representation of the community that's being affected by that problem. So based on age or gender and other kind of background demographic markers, you can make sure that that pool of people, anyone from that community could look at that pool of people and say, there's someone in there that looks like me, that feels like me. And they're given a problem and facilitated over an extended period of time, sometimes months, to find common ground and solutions that are exposed to subject matter experts and a range of sources and really taken through a process where they can uncover the nuances and the complexities of that issue to find compromises and trade-offs or a series of recommendations that they as a group can all feel empowered to stand behind and to live with. So apologies, I did hit the play button as soon as I anticipated that, but who you just heard from there was Paulie Cameron from the New Democracy Foundation, who is the founder of Changed Politics. And I think probably the mastermind behind the Oscar Ginsburg video, but yeah, you'd have to ask her that. And yeah, hopefully that further articulates a little bit of the Citizens' Assembly. I'll get into the next few. Only people are twisted as well. Oh yeah. So apologies for the slide here. I was hoping to have some other stats here. And but basically I really wanted to draw on the rethinking and reimagining aspect, which closely obviously aligns with the theme of the conference. So connecting with the New Democracy Foundation was quite advantageous to us at the time and I'll get into a bit of the timeline on the next slide. Because myself and my manager, we were really looking for something to further the democratization of student voice at Western Sydney University and looking at re-envigorating the student voice interest and student voice, which is quite a challenge in a multi-campus environment where critical mass is difficult to come by and where student leadership and student representative roles are becoming increasingly populated by the same faces, which I probably needless to say, but offers quite a little diversity of opinion. So we started at the end of 2020 all the way back then with our university staff spending process to gain the $60,000 funding we needed to execute the project. We then engaged with our friends in New Democracy over a couple of months, I believe it was, and our facilitator Scott, who some of you might be familiar with, Scott Newton, to hash out some of the details and throughout that 2021 period, while at the same time, we're developing our information kit for the Citizens Assembly resource, which I'll go into the importance of in a moment. But we then sought our endorsement from the Vice Chancellor and the Chancellor and sent out the invitations to join the Citizens Assembly to students by the end of last year, by the end of 2021. Earlier this year, we convened the Citizens Assembly panel sessions over four Saturdays split roughly up by about three weeks apart for each panel. We took the students through the process of unpacking the question we posed to them, how should students have a voice at Western Sydney Uni? And then this brought us to the final panel in May where the VC attended in person to receive the recommendations, physical copy. He confirmed with us that there, that we would then engage the relevant internal stakeholders to provide meaningful responses to each recommendation for his sign-off and we can get a little bit into where we go next later on. As I just mentioned, one thing that I personally found really important and I am gonna provide a couple of other reflections, but this one I think is quite important, was particularly important in my context because the learning curve for me was the importance of collecting robust data around not only our student representatives, but also other student voice data points throughout our university and ensuring this information is available, accessible and synthesized in meaningful ways. Developing the information kit was, sorry, developing this information kit for the students, assembly student members was a large piece of work. And I think that's probably what really sort of drew out our timeline while we sort of set up and negotiated with New Democracy and Scott of how when they would run and many, many sort of aspects were sort of waiting on the information kit to be sort of produced into a sort of final piece of work. So I will take this learning with me into the future of student voice at my university and I'm gonna embed this piece of work into the training of future student representatives. I think it's really important because of the transparency that it actually gives the student reps a bit of metadata about voting, nominations, elections, that sort of thing. So it actually, this approach links really well with the assembly's recommendation number 12, which posits that student representatives at Western are not well equipped enough with the relevant skills and knowledge to undertake their responsibilities. That was their perspective, their understanding of all of the information that we've been given them. And yeah, I suppose I tend to agree. And I think that really reflects on the importance of robustly working with our student reps from our unit to be able to upskill them to the point where they do have that sort of, where they are in that position of self-determination, I suppose. Yeah, so just giving them, like I said, election data, voting, engagement data, socio-economic statistics about the student population, languages spoken and student feedback about major campus-based issues. The list is obviously endless and I don't need to go into that. So yeah, as I said, I think it really just would enhance their demolition, their sort of termination. By the way, the citizen, by the information pack we developed for the Citizens' Assembly is available online. And I've got to actually link to the webpage that we developed on the next slide. If undertaking support to a Citizens' Assembly again, I think collating the essential information ahead of starting the call after the Citizens' Assembly is going to be the first and the highest priority. So just a little, yeah, sort of ramming out that link. Sorry. So the process, so step one, collecting a random sample of 6,000 currently enrolled students, this was not as easy as we anticipated, like from the get-go, but working with sort of an analytics team, you may have some sort of equivalent in your organizations. Yeah, sort of helped smooth that process out for us. And yeah, and then the next step, step two was to, as I mentioned earlier, sending out that snail mail invitation, which the New Democracy Foundation really sort of drove, you know, drove home for us the importance of getting students something a bit more tangible, tactile to sort of like receive in the mail something that they could, they feel a bit more personalized rather than just the email, but we certainly did. Follow those particular students up with the email reminder, you know, check your mail box, you know, you've got something coming to you, that kind of thing. The next step was, you know, after hearing from however many respondents it was, I believe it could be wrong, but I think it was about 300. I think students didn't return with interest. Unimocracy was sort of looking after that aspect. And then the process that they undertook was stratifying the respondents. So as you heard earlier, the importance of making sure that the, you know, it wasn't truly random in the sense that yeah, everyone was just sort of randomly assorted that there was, you know, adequate post-grad student representation, for example, that there was, you know, first nations voices, international student voices, there was, you know, there was a really diverse mix. Campuses, we have many of them, schools. I'm sure you get the gist, so yeah. The next step was to send 35, I think it was approximately invitations to potential panel members, to assembly members with the information of the times, the dates, the locations, which they had been provided to, I believe, in the actual initial invitation to that 6,000, but just to reiterate, yeah, that information to them. And I believe that they were all given cloud from new democracies phone numbers that they could keep in touch with him. And then the next step was, so the panels were actually held face to face, which was a really nice change, nice break. I won't even mention it. Everyone's thinking it. At our most central campus in Parramatta, located in the suburb of Rodham, here in Western Sydney, and each panel was held on the Saturday for approximately seven hours each day, facilitated by our consultant, assisted by an democracy, and more or less most of the logistics were taken care of by the logistics, including catering. It was really important to make sure that there was food there, obviously. And then the next step was get the recommendations to the Vice-Chancellor, which I mentioned a moment ago, which was really nice to hand that to him for like face to face. And then the last step was to make sure that all the students who participated, even in part, because there were a couple, I think in the final session, we unfortunately only had about, I think it was 22 out of that initial sort of 32 to 35 odd, but just making sure that they were reversed for their time. So findings and observations, like there's quite some significant learnings here. As I mentioned before, the 14 recommendations are available on the webpage. So I've got that QR code up to our Citizens Assembly webpage on the Western City University website. We really recommend you check that out. I'll be sort of updating that periodically, particularly when we've got some more robust responses from the internal stakeholders to the 14 recommendations, but yeah. So yeah, some of the recommendations were slightly surprising in that they weren't necessarily directly, I suppose, in the realm of what you'd consider performatively student voice. However, I would say that they largely fit in the periphery of student experience broadly. So I think they acknowledged the lack of agency and involvement in decision-making and speak to, I suppose, many of the known issues communicating with students, student communication in this contemporary neoliberalist higher education environment. So this is very likely, yet I'll admit unconfirmed being representative of the population from the perspective of the random inputs or in other words, like the illicitly diverse perspectives. The recommendations, I think, acknowledge a stark decline in our student community's access to having a seat at the table, taking the form of many competing internal environments that disseminate information relevant to the student experience. And this tiered approach, you probably can't see it very well. Apologies for that, but yeah, it came up with sort of like three rings of engagement for students to participate in student voice sort of activity, I suppose. And that was a really nice, I think, way of breaking it up into a bit of a sort of a model. And I think what this captures is informing a possible redesign of the student representative model, which was sort of meeting our initial expectation of reimagining, rethinking the student representative structure at Western Sydney University, which was, yeah, really nice. So we've not yet conducted a post-assembly survey to see if the students who participated feel a greater sense of civic participation and connection to their student community. So that's on the cards. I would really like to get that done as soon as possible because it's now not really that fresh in their minds. But, you know, one thing I would do for next time is, and recommending to anyone who would be interested in this, is to not forget doing some sort of pre and then post sort of survey of their sort of sense of agency, connection, belonging to the student community, et cetera. And I think obtaining that quantifiable data, like I was saying earlier about the information kid, I think it's just one of those things that would be really good to have. It's not something that we tend to, I think, prioritize in sort of our professional space in our area. And anecdotally, and I think this is supported by one of the students. So Sam in the segment on Life Matters on ABC Radio National, I would be confident in reporting that most citizen assembly student members have an increased sense of student engagement with their institution rather than feeling like they're still stuck in this transactional sort of consumer neoliberalist relationship with the uni. We received really positive feedback from the VC, so that was really good. And our other internal stakeholders with so far touch base, we'd like to communications team, for example, sort of the ITT that looks after our service now platform. They, yeah, we've just, yeah, we've had so much intrigue in the process and yeah, I've been recommending it to a couple of different colleagues, well, most colleagues really. And yeah, the only thing I would probably say is, yeah, probably just consider maybe like really being clear on that question. I think we sort of classed too broad over a net, but I'm glad that we did it. It was really nice to have that sort of broadness as well. I'm glad to have established next networks with experts recommended by New Democracy, one being our very own SCA Piper Bell as well who spoke. I think at our first workshop, I believe it was, which was really nice to hear from her. And I also think that furthering like this community of practice will showcase civic participation and encourage it furthering our student leaders, which I think really, yeah, sort of contributes again to that sort of ASP conversation and I'm really enjoying those parallels there as well, but it does require further work. It's a cultural piece and I think, yeah, there's definitely a lot more to be done in that space. And yeah, like I said, the information pack has mentioned, it's just gonna be a really useful resource to keep building on and maintaining that robust data set into the future. So what's next? So much more work, which is great though. So there's, as I think I mentioned, I think I alluded to, we're still sort of in that ongoing internal stakeholder piece engaging with a couple of other stakeholders. One being sort of ourselves really, because some of the recommendations and apologies that they didn't really get the sort of capacity to include it in this presentation, but they are linked up on that webpage so I encourage you to go and check out those recommendations for yourselves. I think you'll probably see a lot of parallels with student feedback in your own institutions, but yeah, the piece that we're in is, yeah, I think there's maybe sort of two, three-ish kind of groups where we're still sort of getting to kind of refine our responses on behalf of the VC to the recommendations. And I think it's just about sort of ironing out and clarifying some of the things. And yeah, one of the next pieces, depending on if our timelines are blowing out for the year, is seeking some more additional staff funding to further supplement and assist us compile responses. But also the more important, I think, work is really just kind of communicating all of this to the student body. That's one thing I would reflect on that. I think we've not done justice to it. I'd really like to see us communicate this more with the broader student body and making more students aware that this piece of work has been going on and what's going into the future and how it's actually gonna go in terms of benefiting students and their access to student voice. A little bit meta there, right? But yeah, so hopefully this plants seeds and nurtures the beginnings of some of the projects we'll need to pilot for use cases per the recommendations. And I really sort of, as a final thought, really just engaging the students that, yeah, attended it and were part of the citizens assembly and keeping them in sort of our networks and our circles. So thank you for, yeah, participating, listening. If there's any kind of questions or if there's anything else that you wanted me to go over, I'm happy to. I probably should have had my contact details somewhere on the slides and I just realized I didn't actually really contextualize what the work area that I work from. So just before I open up the questions, there's my email in the chat and student community is our team. We used to be called student representation participation, but yeah, over a couple of change plans within the institution. We've changed names a couple of times, but now we sit in the space with student clubs and student leadership training. And that's sort of more or less a bit of a mentor program, but yeah, that's our sort of context. Does anyone have any questions? I have a question. That's okay. Cool. Just want to say thank you. That was really, that was great. I'm from ANU. We're currently looking at putting together some, I guess what you said, like the middle tier kind of like those open forum events and kind of looking at how student representation is done at the moment. But I'm coming at this from like an IT background and program background. So I was wondering kind of how some of the more like professional stakeholders have reacted to this and the scope of it as well. And also a secondary question if you don't mind is how did you look at building in like an inclusive lens to the students that you selected? Yeah, awesome. So yeah, to your first question and thank you, really good questions. The, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the sense that your area probably looks after maybe some of your sort of platform within the institution in terms of like service delivery and that sort of stuff. Do you by any chance look after service now or some sort of equivalent of like some sort of ticketing like work requests kind of platform? Yes and no. So I'm a part of a program of work that's looking at the student experience overall and how that can be uplifted over the next five years. So it's a huge piece of work and that's going to be one part of it. So yes and no, yeah. Cool, awesome. Well, yeah. So our colleagues in, I think I mentioned our like service delivery slash service excellence department which is sort of, I guess, kind of broken off a little bit from IT. So still in IT, but sort of next to IT at the same time. They are like one of the ones who I was referring to really, really intrigued by this process. They would really like to see some functionality of, and I don't know what institutions do use it and don't use it, but we use a platform called ServiceNow for IT work requests and many others now that we're getting other aspects of the institution on board with that. There's some functionality that when we touch base with them about one recommendation, they actually sort of said, well, actually we have this ideas kind of functionality where students can like kind of have this almost like Reddit style kind of democratic discussion and it can be moderated and, you know, require student logins. So there's sort of like that cyber safety kind of aspect to it. So they responded really well. They were actually like, what can you, can you kind of come in and be like our cheerleaders for the work that we're trying to present to like other stakeholders in the union? Well, like this works really well. So yes, really, really positively. And I think taking some of these aspects back with you, I think, well, I mean, I hope, Ms. Cross, your colleagues would be, you know, sort of in that same realm of thinking. And what was the other question? You said something about inclusive, Levin, sorry, I didn't write the whole question down. Let's talk it, more question around kind of like when you're starting to select these students, do you kind of narrow down quite significantly? Like, was there a particular approach around how to be inclusive while narrowing down? Cause that's something we're kind of encountering at the moment. Yeah, for sure. Look, I'll be honest, like we didn't, we weren't the caretakers of the stratification process. That was new democracy that took that on board to also help with bias as well, because they didn't know any of our students. And we know, you know, a lot of our student leaders and that kind of thing. So, but I believe yet it was a bit of a process of sort of, you know, categorizing all students into a bit of a data set, you know, and, yeah. Look, if I could be honest, maybe connecting with the democracy to get sort of maybe their thoughts on how to do that might be the way to go. But if I were to do it myself, I would probably just, yeah, make sure that I'm sort of, yeah, grouping students into those kinds of categories and really making sure that, yeah, there's a voice fit for all of those marginalized communities particularly, and then all the schools, et cetera. So, yeah.