The panel is more than a conventional opinion survey, since its members are encouraged to deepen their understanding of the issues involved. Activities carried out by such groups may include: completing questionnaires, discussing specific and cross-cutting issues affecting the community (e.g. environment, crime or local health services), and contributing to community planning (i.e. brainstorming on problems, social needs and possible solutions). They are normally established because of their effectiveness in widening participation. However, on occasions, panels are created to influence particular groups, in other words, they can be politically driven. Whichever the case, one major challenge for citizen panels is to decide how representative of the population the panel is to be, and how to achieve this – not only in terms of gender, age, ethnics or social status, but also in terms of ideologies and political orientation 
in the process, which may require the organisers going beyond extracting information from the participants to more substantive consultation processes and the provision of coherent explanation of what has changed as a result of their contributions. Finally, we should recognise that Citizen Panels – just like Citizens’ Juries – should be seen as a potential instrument to representative institutions, a way of bringing informed citizens’ perspectives into the decision-making process.