Herzberg listens
In Herzberg (Elster), citizens are not only asked for their views once the plans have already been drawn up. The small town in Brandenburg has permanently anchored citizens’ juries in its local regulations. Its latest process, "OPEN_HERZ", revolved around a question that initially sounds rather dry: What data does a liveable town need? Behind it, however, some very tangible everyday problems emerged.
What data does Herzberg need?
There are questions that sound like digital administration and end up at a dangerous road junction. What data does a town need? One might think of spreadsheets, measurements, perhaps those online portals where public authorities publish datasets. The citizens of Herzberg on the Black Elster River, by contrast, think about the traffic lights on the B87 federal road.
At the OPEN_HERZ Citizens’ Jury on 26 August 2026, participants talked about the dangerous situation for cyclists on the B87, potholes on the cycle path from Osteroda, missing event calendars and trees whose planting beds are so small that they can barely survive without additional watering. Others wanted to know when buses run, where drinking-water fountains can be found or what leisure activities are available for young people. What begins as a discussion about data quickly becomes a discussion about life in a small town.
Experts on everyday life
That is precisely what was intended. The town initially selected 1,000 people between the ages of 25 and 80 at random from the population register. Three hundred of them received a personal invitation from the mayor. The selection was intended to reflect differences in age, gender and life experience, as well as residents of both the town centre and the surrounding districts. The town also wanted to reach people with an international background.
“We are not looking for data experts,” says Angela Berger of the Civic Data Lab. Instead, the town was looking for “experts on their own everyday lives”. A card game helps translate those everyday experiences into data: bus stops, childcare centres, the market square, trees. What would people need to know about them for the town to work better?
In the end, five areas emerge: mobility, family and education, nature and climate, administration and transparency, and the town centre and quality of life. The suggestions are now to feed into the town’s data strategy. By the end of 2026, the OPEN_HERZ project is expected to produce an implementation plan setting out which data the municipality should make greater use of and publish. The University of Applied Sciences Potsdam is providing academic support.
“What do I have to do to reach you?”
The evening becomes particularly interesting when the data laboratory turns into local politics. Mayor Karsten Eule-Prütz and Stephanie Kuntze, head of the department responsible for central management and services as well as family and education, respond directly to the concerns raised.
Several participants complain that information from the town does not reach them – notices about construction projects, for example, or about events. Eule-Prütz turns the question around: “What do I have to do to reach you?”
Other issues are more complicated. The B87 is the responsibility of the state road authority. Schliebener Straße, with its narrow pavement, has been a problem for years. And then there is the outdoor swimming pool. According to the mayor, renovating it would cost around €10 million. The town is therefore keeping it open with as little expenditure as possible – in the hope that one day there will once again be enough money. Citizens’ juries do not make jurisdictional boundaries or holes in municipal budgets disappear. Sometimes they merely make them more visible.
It all began with a bicycle
OPEN_HERZ is not the first experiment of its kind. For several years, Herzberg has been grappling with the question of how to reach citizens who do not already attend public meetings, submit petitions or become politically involved.
In 2022, as part of the Brandenburg state initiative “Meine Stadt der Zukunft” (“My Town of the Future”), the town launched a Citizens’ Jury on mobility. The project was called “Radeln in die Zukunft#Villa” (“Cycling into the Future#Villa”), and its participants called themselves “Stadtmacher” – town makers. They were tasked with developing recommendations for a safe and attractive network of pedestrian and cycle routes. The town explicitly wanted to begin by thinking “from the citizens’ perspective, for citizens”.
Two hundred people were initially contacted. Thirteen responded on their own initiative. Because that was not a particularly strong response, the process did not end with the letter. Town employees visited randomly selected citizens in person and persuaded two more to take part. In the end, 15 Herzberg residents participated.
That is the distinctive feature of the town’s “outreach sortition” method: the lottery does not simply determine who receives an invitation. Municipal employees then make an explicit effort to reach those randomly selected citizens who initially fail to respond to a written invitation.
A paragraph for the lottery
Even before the first Citizens’ Jury met, Herzberg had taken an unusual step. The town council amended its residents participation statute. Since 12 March 2022, Section 6 has regulated the “Outreach Sortition Procedure for Citizen Participation” for project-based mini publics selected by lot. Herzberg thus became the first German municipality to enshrine this procedure in its local regulations.
What comes and goes elsewhere as a pilot project was intended to stay. The town explicitly wanted to prevent the Citizens’ Jury from becoming a passing “fad”. The statute also created a legal basis for using information from the population register for random selection.
Stephanie Kuntze explained the thinking behind the procedure during the first Citizens’ Jury. The town wanted to listen to as many citizens as possible, particularly those “who would otherwise not participate of their own accord”. The aim was to obtain a broader picture of opinion within the town.
An experiment becomes a series
The first Citizens’ Jury was indeed not the last. The mobility process was followed by further mini publics. Among other things, the town experimented with citizens’ juries on making Herzberg more family-friendly, creating a lively town centre and establishing a focal point for cultural education, participation and civic engagement.
For the Citizens’ Jury on cultural education in 2024, as many as 1,000 citizens were randomly selected. They were asked to develop ideas for activities for children and young people, for the music and creative industries, and for cultural associations.
What has emerged in Herzberg therefore differs from a conventional permanent mini public. The same randomly selected group does not sit permanently in the town hall. Instead, the procedure itself has been institutionalised: new project-based citizens’ juries can repeatedly be selected by lot to consider different questions.
That corresponds closely to the intention the town had already expressed in 2022. The new form of participation was to be “tested, established and optimised”. Enshrining it in local law was intended to familiarise politicians, administrative staff and citizens alike with the new procedure.
What happens after the discussions?
That does not automatically solve the most difficult problem of citizen participation: What happens afterwards?
At the first Citizens’ Jury, the broad objectives on mobility were translated into concrete measures and priorities at a second meeting in October 2022. They were intended to feed into further planning for the pedestrian and cycle network. The route is also clearly defined for the current OPEN_HERZ process: the results will be combined with data analyses, the knowledge of administrative staff and the findings of the academic team. Together, these are to form the basis of the future data strategy.
After the latest Citizens’ Jury, Stephanie Kuntze says that the town has already developed data models for education, population and mobility. The participants’ suggestions are now intended to help present data in ways that make decisions easier to understand and information more visible. Another round of discussions is planned for next year.
The limits of citizens’ knowledge
Of course, this procedure can also be romanticised. A randomly selected citizen does not automatically know the better solution. Three hours of discussion are no substitute for transport planning or budget deliberations. And if only a fraction of hundreds of invited citizens actually attend, the resulting group does not automatically provide an exact reflection of the population.
But Herzberg is at least trying to solve a familiar problem of citizen participation in a different way. Usually, those who take part are the citizens who have the time, are already interested and have learned how to make themselves heard by politicians and administrative staff. Sortition reverses the direction: citizens do not have to find out where participation is taking place. The town goes looking for its citizens.
That may sound like a small shift. For a democracy, it is not such a small one.
The town asks first
The OPEN_HERZ evening ultimately shows why this can work. Citizens talk about missing data – and end up discussing buses, cycle paths, the outdoor swimming pool, a tree or the question of why they never heard about a particular event. Administrative staff talk about responsibilities, money and technical possibilities. Both sides learn something that no dataset can fully capture: how the other side experiences the town.
On its “Stadtmacher” website, Herzberg itself describes the hope behind the model in remarkably sober terms. Such citizens’ juries may not make planning processes faster. But they could be “citizen-oriented, and so from the very beginning”.
Perhaps that is the more important measure of success. Herzberg now collects plenty of data. But since 2022, the town has also been systematically collecting something else: the experiences of its citizens. And because the sortition procedure is now enshrined in the municipal statute, those responsible do not have to reinvent the process of bringing citizens to the table every time.