The City of Cambridge has selected 40 residents to serve on the City's first-ever Civic Assembly following a public lottery held on October 5. The panel was designed to reflect the diversity of Cambridge while ensuring meaningful representation of experiences relevant to the Assembly's focus on gun violence and video surveillance technology in public parks.

The selected panel includes residents across a balanced mix of gender, age, neighborhood, race and ethnicity, housing status, education levels, and experience with gun violence. Nearly all Cambridge neighborhoods are represented in the Assembly. While proportionality to citywide demographics guided the process, the City incorporated adjustments to ensure that groups with particularly relevant lived experiences-especially individuals or communities affected by gun violence-were meaningfully included.

Highlights of the panel composition include:

Gender:

There is representation across male, female, and non-binary/other groups, with two non-binary panelists to avoid underrepresentation. 50 percent of the panelists are female and 45 percent are male.

Age:

There is balanced inclusion across age groups. 22.5 percent are between the ages of 16-24 years old, and 27.5 percent are 55 years and older.

Neighborhood:

All neighborhoods with the exception of MIT/Area 2 were represented. As part of the process design, the City ensured that seats were allocated to areas more affected by gun violence. These neighborhoods include The Port, North Cambridge, Wellington-Harrington and Baldwin.

Housing Status:

The panel includes homeowners (35 percent), renters at market rate (42.5 percent), subsidized renters (20 percent), and one panelist experiencing transitional housing.

Race and Ethnicity:

The panel is proportionally representative across racial categories, except for an intentional increase in the number of Black residents on the panel (22.5 percent) due to focus areas and lived experience.

Education:

The panel includes people across all education levels, with separate consideration for 16-24 year-olds who are still completing or have not completed schooling.

Experience with Gun Violence:

Half of the panel included residents with direct, familial, or community-level experience with gun violence, ensuring these perspectives inform the forthcoming deliberations.

The City will contact selected residents by the end of this week to confirm their participation and provide next steps. If residents are not selected, they may still have an opportunity to participate. Next week, the City will select alternate panelists from among those who were not selected. These alternates may be asked to join the process in place of any selected residents that may not be able to participate during the four sessions.

About Cambridge Civic Assembly Process

The City began by sending 15,000 random invitations to Cambridge households in early September, drawn randomly from a pool of more than 52,000 unique addresses after combining duplicate address records. Each selected address received a unique invitation code. One person per household could enter the lottery.

After receiving responses, the City used a two-step randomized method to choose the final Assembly. First, it generated 1,000 possible panels, each containing 40 residents and meeting the above demographic and lived-experience representation requirements. From these, a final panel was randomly selected, ensuring every respondent had a fair chance while preventing anyone from having a disproportionately high likelihood of selection. This method, developed through research involving MIT collaborators, mathematically guaranteed fairness and representativeness.

The resulting panel brings together a broad range of perspectives to study and make recommendations.

About Cambridge Civic Assembly

Over four Saturdays between October and December 2026, the 40 selected Assembly members will learn from a diverse range of testimonies, deliberate together, and develop recommendations for the City Council on the future of public safety and surveillance technology -- including the use of gunshot detection systems and video surveillance cameras in Cambridge public parks.

The initiative, which is the first municipal Civic Assembly process to take place in Massachusetts and one of the first in New England, responds to a City Council policy order introduced at a special meeting on July 23, 2026, calling for the City to pilot a community-driven deliberative process focused on public safety. The Civic Assembly is being organized by the City Council and City Manager in collaboration with FIDE North America, an independent nonprofit specializing in democratic deliberation, and being supported by community partners.

Members of the community can learn more about the Civic Assembly process by visiting www.cambridgema.gov/civicassembly.