Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery. 2691-199X/2022/1-ART1 $15.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3524064 Digit. Gov.: Res. Pract. Convening a Minipublic During a Pandemic: A Case Study of the Oregon Citizens’ Assembly Pilot on COVID-19 Recovery JOHN GASTIL 1 Distinguished Professor in the Departments of Communication Arts & Sciences and Political Science and Senior Scholar at the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, Pennsylvania State University CHRIS ANDERSON Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Communication, University of Oklahoma LAURA BLACK Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, Ohio University STEPHANIE BURKHALTER Professor and Chair in the Department of Politics, California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt SOO-HYE HAN Associate Professor in the Department of English, Tsuda University JUSTIN REEDY Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Research Associate in the Institute for Public Policy Research & Analysis, University of Oklahoma ROBERT RICHARDS Assistant Professor in the Clinton School of Public Service, University of Arkansas JOHN ROUNTREE Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts & Communication, University of Houston-Downtown From July-August, 2020, the nonprofit organization Healthy Democracy convened a seven-week pilot test of an online Citizen Assembly on the state of Oregon’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This pilot project presented a unique research opportunity because its organizers had ten years of experience running the Citizens’ Initiative Review, a face -to-face minipublic authorized by the State of Oregon to write voting guides for the wider electorate on ballot measures. This case study compares survey data from the Citizen Assembly pilot with the prior Citizens’ Initiative Reviews and provides analysis and recommendations that could improve the design and execution of future online assemblies. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing→E-government • Social and professional topics→Government technology policy 1 The first author was the principal investigator for this project and wrote the first draft of this report. Each of the co-authors made substantial contributions to the paper and the research effort, with their order in this list merely alphabetical by last name. The first author can be reached at jgastil@psu.edu or Dept. of Comm. Arts & Sciences, 234 Sparks Building, Penn State University, University Park, PA 16802, USA.