Various methods for choosing who will participate in a deliberative body or activity

1) Election: People selected by the votes of those who will be effected, or by a geographical population. (They may be elected as representatives of their constituents' interests in legislative or bargaining activities, or as presenters of their constituents' viewpoints, but they are usually seen as answerable in some way to those who elected them.)

2) Random Selection: People chosen at random from a specific population.

3) Stake Holder selection: Representatives of interest groups concerned about the issue in question.

4) Demographic Selection: People who collectively represent the demographic or opinion profile of a larger population or community, according to certain parameters (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, location, socio-economic status, or opinion on the issue in question).

5) Volunteer Selection: Anyone interested in the issue. (A low-level form of this is "whoever shows up," which usually includes an inordinate proportion of partisans.)

6) Cellular Selection: Several comparable groups of people chosen by comparable means, such as people chosen at random from different sizes of towns.

7) Community Reference Selection: People whose names come up repeatedly when the need for a particular kind of group is made known to networks linked to all sectors of the whole community.

8) Powerholder Selection: Those who have the power to implement or block any decisions are selected (or select who they want). This is often combined with stakeholder selection.

9) Expertise Selection: Those with the most knowledge, experience, competence or credentials regarding the issue under consideration.

10) Hybrid Selection Methods (Mixed): These combine various methods above, such as choosing a Demographic Selection from among a pool of volunteers (as in Consensus Conference), or making a demographic selection from a randomly selected pool (as in manya Citizen Jury). This latter method is sometimes called Stratified Sampling, which can also mean selecting people randomly from within several different specified demographic groups. Cellular Selection is always combined with one or more specific selection methods. In a Citizen Deliberative Council, representatives, stakeholders, powerholders and experts are viewed as resources for groups of citizens usually chosen by some mix of random, demographic, volunteer or community reference selection.