Special Events Presentation of the Cambridge City Council

Good afternoon, everyone. It's about 5.01, so we'll get started. It is really wonderful to be here in the Sullivan Chamber for this very special moment in Cambridge's civic life. I want to begin by welcoming my colleagues. So, I'll go around the room. We have former Mayor and City Councilor Eden E. Simmons, we have former mayor and city councilor McGovern, you have Councilors Zusy We're joined by Councilor Al-Zubi. We're also joined by Councillor Sobrinho-Wheeler. Thank you all for being here, and of course to our city team here, to the many community members who have entered the lottery or are here simply because you care deeply about the future of our city.

I want to take a moment to especially recognize the city team and partners who've made this possible, including our City Manager Yi-An Huang and Jackson Price, our Director of Community Engagement. who has been leading this work for the city. We're also really grateful Esasi, I should have talked to you about how to say your name when we met. But from FIDE North America, we have Bailey Flanagan faculty at MIT and we have Carmel Borahev, a PhD student at MIT. So today's a really historic day for our city. We're here today to select 40 residents from a lottery

on our first ever Civic Assembly, a milestone for civic engagement in the city. The Civic Assembly is a new and innovative approach to community engagement that will help shape This is the first municipal civic assembly process in Massachusetts and one of the first in the country. That alone is worth celebrating. But what truly makes tonight really meaningful is the commitment of our community to show up, to participate and imagine together with thoughtful inclusive policymaking can look like. So to that end, I really want to acknowledge the extraordinary effort that's gone into getting us here. Back in July, the City Council asked the city team to make this response a priority.

and they've been delivering with long hours, weeks and weeks of preparation, countless phone calls and many meetings. And in just a few minutes members of the Civic Assembly team will walk us through Thank you very much. Over four Saturdays between October and December 2026, the 40 members of the Civic Assembly will learn about the topic From a diverse range of testimonies and experts, they'll deliberate together and ultimately produce recommendations on the future of public safety and surveillance technologies for the City Council. And on behalf of the City Council, we look forward to receiving these recommendations that come from the Assembly.

Collaboration and Community. And whether you're here in our chamber or tuning in through CCTV to 22 City View, thank you for being part of this moment. Let's look forward with excitement to the ideas and perspectives Thank you so much. I really look forward to getting this election process started. With that, I'll turn it over to the city team for a brief presentation. Thank you.

Thank you through you, Mayor Siddiqui. I just wanted to also echo your thanks to so many city staff and departments that contributed to this. There was a lot of thoughtfulness that's already gone into the planning, and I know that there is a lot Thank you very much. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing and we're excited about this process and really appreciate Everybody, the council supporting this.

People in our community volunteering their time coming into this process, our partners. and I'll turn it over to Jackson to kind of kick us off but a big thank you to so many who have gotten us to this point. And we're looking forward to learning as part of this new process and seeing if this is a new way that we can really engage our community and have a different kind of deliberative discourse on difficult issues.

Thank you, City Manager. I will dive into the presentation and keep this relatively brief so we can get to the selection. Thank you for the warm welcome, Mayor Siddiqui. And thank you to all those here in the hall and watching online wherever you are in the world today. Before I dive in, I just want to say that The question we're dealing with and the topic we're doing is quite sensitive. And a lot of tragic circumstances led us here today, and it's important that we treat this topic with care. So Cambridge, as many of you know, is launching its first ever civic assembly to assist the city council's evaluation process. of the use of surveillance technologies and public safety.

Specifically, this assembly will consider whether how and under what conditions the city should use Gunshot detection technology such as ShotSpotter and overnight video surveillance of public parks and its approach to public safety, including what rules safeguards and oversights. should govern their use. We are moving from the City Council's direction to community-driven recommendations in less than five months. The council gave us an order to convene this assembly in August The week of September 7th we mailed invitations to over 15,000 Cambridge residents encouraging them to sign up to serve. Today we'll be drawing the 40 members who will serve on the assembly. Afterwards, we will reach out to each of those members to confirm their participation.

The assembly sessions will kick off starting October 24, which is a Saturday and they will run every other Saturday until December 5 upon which the community will share their recommendations with the city council. Over the past eight weeks our team has been working quickly and thoughtfully to our communications and community engagement approach to the process. as City Manager Wang was saying. In conjunction with the 15,000 randomly sent invitations to Cambridge households we really did direct outreach to neighborhoods that are disproportionately affected by gunshot incidents including the port and did door-to-door outreach to those who received the invitation, answered any questions and encouraged them to participate.

In addition, we worked with housing providers and local nonprofits to get the word out to the communities that they serve, encouraging them to sign up for the assembly should they have received an invitation. We've been working quite diligently to communicate what a Civic Assembly is. We have built a robust communications digital presence at cambridgema.gov slash civic assembly, I would encourage everyone if you haven't already to visit the website and check out All of this effort is to make this process transparent and inclusive and answer any questions. Cambridge has a pretty robust civic muscle already, but understandably there isn't much understanding of what a civic assembly is. So that's been a lot of our focus so far.

Interest in the Civic Assembly was citywide. We had over 400 people respond to the invitation and we had invites or folks sign up in all 13 Cambridge neighborhoods. There's a wide spread here indicated on the map and most of the More blank areas are university properties. That's just about a 3% response rate to the mailer, which is pretty typical that we see in other civic assemblies across the country and the world. I think one distinction we were working with is most cities recruit over a period of four to six weeks. We did this in about two and a half, so I was very impressed and grateful for the staff who made this possible We had people ages young as 16 sign up for the process and folks older than 75.

And I think this points to what intentional community-driven design can look like. We've been working with Bailey Flanagan to my left and the MIT Political and Computer Science Department to manage the civic lottery process and the sortition. Thank you for joining us. So we invited 15,000 people. We received 400 people signing up Many different panels were created to reach the demographic targets that we're looking for. And tonight, we will choose one of those panels, 40 person panels to represent the assembly across a variety of categories.

There are two types of categories we were aiming for in terms of representation. Wherever we could, population data from the census to match the composition of the group so I won't call out all these in the interest of time but if you take gender for example The group we pick will be largely split according to the gender split here in Cambridge, with the caveat that we created space for folks who identify as non-binary or other which the census doesn't capture will be sufficiently represented in the group. When it comes to housing status, there will be representation proportional to population data for homeowners, renters who rent at a market rate and renters We also created space to ensure that there's representation from community members who were previously unhoused, who live in permanent supportive housing.

And it's very important, we heard from city councilors and community members the importance of ensuring that the folks on this panel, there's representation from people with lived experience on this topic. and given that one of the two topics is related to gunshot detection and gun violence in Cambridge, we made a deliberative design choice to ensure that half the panel will have at least some lived experience with gun violence, either personal family or close connections, close friends. Or they live in a community that has experienced that trauma We did this rather than estimating that half the Cambridge population would have this experience and the other half won't. So here's how it will work.

We have emailed all the members who signed up and told them which panels they're eligible to be picked on, these are essentially their lottery numbers for lack of a better expression In a moment, the mayor will draw one ball at a time from each of these three machines and read out the digit located named on the ball. Each ball is of equal weight, there's no real distinction between them and the numbers were drawn with Sharpie. The mayor will go our left to right and the number indicated first, second and third will be the order of the digit combination. Then we will show the composition of the panel and the demographics that it reflects. We will not show the names of the members chosen, rather the IDs associated with each member so it's completely anonymized We still need to reach out to confirm with all these 40 people that they're eligible to serve before they take the oath of service

With that, I will invite the mayor up to start the process.

I think that's right?

Yes.

Slow down. Slowly, yes, please. It'll come slowly. And then keep going.

Try the other way. Other way. There you go. Thank you.

Could you hold it up? Six. I don't think I should do the rest, honestly.

Mayor, it's right there.

Number two.

Last one.

Thank you.

Can you turn it off?

Turn off the mic.

So the numbers that the mayor drew were number six, number two and number eight. In a moment, we'll enter this into Panelot. The system MIT uses to run sortition and we'll see the representation chosen on the panel. So here we see 40 numbers. These are the IDs of the members chosen on the assembly. We will reach out to them to confirm their participation as soon as tomorrow and later this week. and below we will see the compositional breakdown of the panel chosen. And if I were to go back

The points I called out earlier in the presentation, you'll see gender is largely split across census data with that exception of the other category. You'll see in housing status for example There is significant representation from both subsidized renters, market race renters permanent supportive housing folks and people who own property in the city of Cambridge. You'll see With the experience with gun violence, that half the panel will have some lived experience with Gun violence on the topic. So 15% of folks on the panel Will have personal direct lived experience A family member or someone close to them represents 18% of the panel. and another 18% has experience with this issue related to the neighborhood that they live in.

And 50% of the panel does not have experience with gun violence. We will be sharing this compositional breakdown on our website, cambridgeandmade.gov slash civic assembly as soon as this evening so folks who are interested I would encourage you to look there and dive into more detail But I want to thank everyone for attending and being part of our first lottery draw. This has been quite exciting, and thank you Mayor for bearing with the machines.

You don't need to thank me for that.

I just want to reiterate that if you don't see your identification number or if you 628. Don't worry, please keep your calendar dates held for those sessions. We will, after we reach out to all the members to confirm their participation, potentially reach out a random selection of alternates to fill in for folks who maybe can't attend for whatever reason. but the folks who step in for alternates will still ensure representation of the composition that we pulled today. I want to remind everyone, the first session starts October 24 and runs through December 5. And recommendations will go back to the city council at the end of the calendar year.

Before we close for our public meeting and public comment I just want to thank everyone again for being here tonight. and participating to the City Council for supporting this event. For the community members who signed up to serve, those who are with us and online it's really great to see High rate of participation in our call to service on this topic, so we thank you. will be speaking to those picked to understand what kind of accommodations they need to serve and ensuring that we can get them those accommodations. Mayor, I'll leave it to you. But thank you everyone for being here and I guess lastly I should have named this more distinctly but A lot of staff work went in to get us to this point. We don't take it for granted, a lot of people had to put down other priorities come up with creative solutions to the

process given to us and there's too many folks to name here you know who you are but we are grateful for your help. We may need more of it in the coming weeks so thank you for getting us this far and uh to stay in tune with the process again cambridgemaid.gov slash civic assembly

Thank you everyone. Our meeting will start promptly at 530.