Municipal governments often struggle to inform and engage citizens around local issues. Due to complexities of local politics and the diverse expressions in public and private spheres, citizens face a huge information barrier towards meaningful participation. To overcome such barrier, we explore a solution to provide citizens with clear, useful, and trustworthy information. We describe a framework for accomplishing this goal through issue-based knowledge crystallization. In order to put this framework into test, we devised Community Issue Review (CIR) as a concrete process for crystallizing local political knowledge. CIR is a structured deliberative process that use a citizen panel to conduct analysis of data relevant to a pending issue. We describe CIR in three aspects of its functions: institutional design, deliberative process, and productive outcome. Three special characteristics of CIR are emphasized: (1) fully embedded within local decision-making context; (2) hybrid (face-to-face and online) deliberation; (3) facilitation on collaborative decision-analysis. We present the iterative design of the CIR process and the lessons learned from field practices in a local community.