Panelot logo 1. Compute a Civic Lottery 2. Draw a Panel Learn More ☰

To compute a civic lottery, you will need two files: a categories file (Step 1) and a pool file (Step 2).

Your data is not going anywhere yet: Until you hit the “Submit” button, none of the information you enter leaves your computer. And, once you complete Step 2, the website will do its best to strip identifying information from your files, and will show you the result before you decide whether to submit or not.

Step 1:

The categories file defines the subgroups (for example: women, people aged between 25 and 34, …) and how many members of each group should be on the chosen panel (for example: the panel should contain at least 19 and at most 20 women).

Please enter the category file as a CSV file with four columns: category, name, min, max. For more details, take a look at this example categories file.

Step 2:

Next, you need to enter the pool file, which lists all people eligible for selection to the panel. Each person needs a unique identifier, and you must indicate which groups the person belongs to.

Please enter the pool file as a CSV file with the identifier column “pool_member_identifier” and one column for each group category from Step 1. Don't worry if your table has additional columns – the website will remove them for you. Take a look at this example pool file, which matches the categories file above.

Step 3:

Input how large the panel should be:

Step 4:

Please make sure that all personal information has successfully been anonymized in the table above. In particular, please check that the identifier column does not contain sensitive information such as e-mail addresses or names:

I confirm that the anonymized table contains no personal information.

Once you hit submit, only the anonymized data is sent to our server. We do not permanently store this anonymized data. We only store the time you make this request, the total number of people in the pool, the size of the panel, and whether the computation ran successfully.