A Citizen Jury is a small, time-bounded deliberative forum where a group of residents (often around a dozen to a couple of dozen people) hear balanced evidence, question witnesses, deliberate together, and produce a set of findings or recommendations, often framed as a “verdict” or “judgment” on a specific public question.
It sits in the family of Mini-publics within Deliberative Democracy and is usually designed to be understandable to the public by borrowing the courtroom metaphor of jurors weighing evidence - involve.org.uk 
# How Participation Is Chosen
Citizen juries typically use Sortition in practice as a civic lottery with some form of stratification (sometimes called “near-random selection”), because a pure random draw is often too risky for small group sizes and too vulnerable to accidental skews - parliament.uk
Recruitment usually means inviting a larger pool and then selecting a final jury that matches key demographics (age, gender, geography, socio-economic background), often with payment to reduce barriers to participation - hisengage.scot
# When to Use a Citizen Jury
Use a citizen jury when the question is narrow enough to be meaningfully judged, the time window is tight, and you want a publicly legible output that reads like a considered decision rather than a brainstorm.
Use a Citizen Assembly when the issue needs broader representation, longer learning, and space to develop a coherent package of recommendations that looks more like a temporary citizens’ chamber.
# See - Citizen Assembly and Sortition - Civic Lottery - Planning Cells - Consensus Conference - Deliberative Democracy and Mini-publics