It was inevitable that the Institute's operating model would construct ‘the citizen’ and ‘deliberation’ in particular ways and would rely on a mix of explicit, implicit and sometimes contradictory assumptions and premises that would only come into sharper focus once the Council had met. This chapter thus explores what occurred as the Citizens Council migrated from an in-house organisational plan to an actual embodied event, in other words, as the meso-level gave way to the micro-level. What consequences flowed from the attempt to implement the model? Would the hopes and ambitions of the advocates of the ideal of deliberative participation be realised? Would the positive and negative experiences reported in accounts of local one-off citizens’ juries be reproduced in a national high-profile standing council?

This chapter – the first of three drawing on transcripts of video records of the events, ethnographic observations and quantitative analyses – provides a detailed account of the first meeting, held at a hotel in Salford late in November 2002, and the nature of the challenges it posed. The next chapter will then go on to explore changes to the design for later meetings and their impact. Both chapters link the analysis to the question that has already been explored in some detail in the empirical research on more conventional forms of citizens’ juries, of what practical lessons can be drawn. Thus far, however, there have been very few studies that might be described as ethnographies of democratic deliberation. This study is the first description of a deliberative forum based on a data corpus made up from videotaped records of the series of events (28,857 lines of transcript in the case of the first meeting alone).

The first section describes the balance of activities that made up the Salford meeting. The second section goes on to look at the process of becoming informed. What sense did the members of the Council make of the material they were given? What stance did they take in relation to the expert witnesses and in what sense were discussions informed by the material presented by witnesses? In the third section, the evidence for deliberation, dialogue, debate and discussion is examined.