The RAISE initiative has been presented by the coordinator, Carlo Sessa, at the World Conference on City Development in Porto Alegre, Brasil, on 14 February 2008, in the session devoted to "Governance and Democracy in Cities". RAISE is a method, Carlo said, to let randomly selected lay citizens be involved in the evaluation of European Union funded research on the sustainable city of tomorrow (and in particular the research related to urban sustainable transport, sustainable built environment, cultural heritage and urban governance). The first application of the method, the RAISE project in 2005, involved a panel of citizens from all countries of Europe who were asked to give their collective judgement on the usability of EU research results in relation to their vision of the sustainable city of tomorrow. The "Citizens Declaration on the City of Tomorrow" was presented at the European Parliament, and it is now available in all EU languages at www.raise-eu.org. This first experiment confirmed that collective thinking and critical discussion with a group of people - the so named "wisdom of crowds" - always works in the right circumstances, to produce a common understanding of complex issues which is better that any individual judgement, even that of the smarter person within the group. The right circumstances include the diversity and true independence from specific stakeholder interests of the people selected, which is ensured by the random selection of pannelists. The RAISE initiative is now continuing involving more people in public discussions of the research and policy agenda for the sustainable city of tomorrow, thanks in particular to two running projects: the "Europe for Citizens Programme" project RAISE-PLUS, which triggered a debate with local citizens in the small town of Lefkara, Cyprus, and the "EU 7th Research Framework" project MOVE TOGETHER, which is going to organise a citizens conference on sustainable urban mobility in the city of Rome, Italy, in Autumn 2008.