Others seem to believe democracy is intrinsically superior to other forms of governance; I’m quite skeptical of that, though agree with tylermjohn that it is often the best way to avoid specific kinds of abuse and coercion.
My guess is that the current non-democratic EA institutions have serious flaws, and democratic replacement institutions would have even more serious flaws, and it’s still worth trying the democratic institutions (in parallel to the current ones) because 2 flawed structures are better than 1. (For example, because the democratic institutions fund important critical work that the current institutions do not.)
A simpler version of this is to have a system of membership, where existing members can nominate new members. Maybe every year some percentage of the membership gets chosen randomly and given the opportunity to nominate someone. In addition to having a process for becoming a member, there could also be processes for achieving higher levels of seniority, with more senior members granted greater input into membership decisions, and processes for nudging people who’ve lost interest in EA to let their membership lapse, and processes to kick out people found guilty of wrongdoing.
I assume there are a lot of membership-based organizations which could be studied: Rotary International, the Red Cross, national fraternities & sororities, etc.
A membership system might sound like a lot of overhead, but I think we’re already doing an ad-hoc, informal version of something like this. As NegativeNuno put it: “Influencing OP decisions requires people to move to the Bay area and become chummy friends with its grants officers.” My vague impression is that at least a few grantmakers like this system, and believe it is a good and necessary way for people to build trust. So if we step back and acknowledge that “building trust” is an objective, and it’s currently being pursued in an ad-hoc way which is probably not very robust, we can ask: “is there a better way to achieve that objective?”