With the above goal in mind, the organizers carefully selected the participants using both “inclusion” and “exclusion”. They selected participants that would reflect and represent the spectrum of the citizenry, while purposefully choosing participants without a medical or professionally-related background to focus solely on society’s values as opposed to the empirical findings. In this way, the organizers attempted to engineer their participating public to express norms that reflected the kind of public the organizers wished to reach.
The participants were all self-selected (volunteers) who applied to participate in the engagement. The organizers then sifted through the lists of volunteers and designated the ‘stakeholder’ (those with vested interests) and ‘non-stakeholder’ groups for the ethics-focused stage allowing only the non-expert, non-stakeholder group to participate.
Thus, the min public designed for the deliberation ended up being 250 volunteers who had been deemed as non-stakeholders, with no previous professional medical or scientific knowledge or experience related to the issue.
==Deliberative Process==