MASS LBP recently ran its innovative civic lottery process among 5000 randomly identified citizens in British Columbia to enlist citizens for a public consultation on the future of biobanks policy and health research.

The Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia and the BC BioLibrary are recruiting members of the general public for a discussion about how people's blood and tissue samples should be used and stored. Selected participants will assemble in Vancouver for two weekend consultations in March 2009.

Genome research affects everyone, and will become more prevalent in the future. It is important that citizens are aware of this research and contribute their perspective to the development of policies that will set standards for this emerging science. Researchers and policy makers are working to create opportunities where citizens and experts can learn from one another and reach shared conclusions about the best policies and regulations.

The Face-to-Face research team at the Centre for Applied Ethics asked MASS LBP for assistance. Building on its growing expertise, MASS designed a 'civic lottery' to select a random sample of citizens that ensured a wide range of voices.

During the process, MASS LBP sent a detailed invitation letter to a randomly generated list of 5000 British Columbians. The letter is a non-transferable lottery ticket inviting the bearer to opt into a pool of respondents. Once the response deadline had passed, the 'winners' were then blindly selected from a pool of respondents until a given number of demographic attributes had been satisfied. For the Biobanking in BC lottery, we controlled for age, sex and geography.

The draw took place on February 11, 2009 at the MASS LBP office in Toronto.

Ultimately, the civic lottery selected people from all parts of the province: from Bela Bela and Quesnal in the north, to Kamloops in the Interior, to Vancouver on the coast. It ensures Biobanking in BC a representative sample prepared to provide robust and reliable input on behalf of all British Columbians.