French citizen's assembly being organised in anticipation of 2027 presidential election

Sharing this because I find it shows a genuine attempt at forcing compromize and empathy back into the public debate. That and fighting demagoguery.

It's called d'un commun accord (meaning "by common agreement) and honestly, this is democracy at it's best. It's spearheaded by Jean-Marc Jancovici et al (that french engineer that came up with the concept of carbon footprint).
Here's the idea: they will select 150 people roughly at random, to be representative of the french population, stick them in a room for 6 weekend, teach them about the issues with help from experts, and then have them discuss about a question until a consensus emerges. You know, basically doing what our politicians should be doing...
Questions with no easy answer, like how do you arbitrate between maintaining purchasing power and manufacturing localy (cann't have both fully...).
Similar citizen's assembly have worked in the past, providing nuanced and often surprisingly selfless decisions (but they do tend to be ignored by politician, hence the timing and the symbolic 1€).
During the upcoming presidential debates, the assembly's conclusion will be a default reasonable point from which politicians will have to argue. Failing that, it will hopefully at least nudge the debate in a more productive direction, and provide a starting point for next try.

And it's sort of working so far, crowdfunding launched on Ulule (french kickstarter) and pulled in already twice as many backers as a typical french political party. The 1€ donation is mainly symbolic, it's the number of people that gives this political weight, not the money.

Obviously don't donate if you aren't french, as that would kind of look like we're faking our numbers with outside help, but maybe you could do something similar in your country?

Politics is hard. If you try and you fail, again and again, then you only really fail when you stop trying.