I am an advocate of democracy through sortition. I am also employed as a structural dynamic finite element analyst.
John Huang
Karma: 9
Sure, I think your proposal is a great idea.
In my opinion you’ve neglected sortition’s ability to vastly improve the capacity of citizens to make informed decisions. Improved capacity makes sortition the better way to select, and hold accountable, political leadership compared to elections.
Hi Abraham, I have a suggestion on how to improve your democratic process if your membership continues to grow.
I’m a huge fan of lottocratic processes (ie sortition) to make informed and smarter democratic decisions than mere voting. The rationale of lottocratic democracy is simple. Imagine how insane it would be that instead of using juries to decide court cases, we decided innocence or guilt based on voting. What jury duty does is facilitate democratic specialization. It allows a representative sample to perform a complex tax so that the larger whole does not have to. I write a full defense of sortition here (and full disclosure, I am a frequent advocate of the practice).
Although the process you have created is much more democratic than the typical nonprofit, you personally retain enormous powers in setting the agenda and setting the final choices that can be allocated. It is admirable that you are putting in significant work to administer the fund; however that choice is not democratic.
I suggest that the fund be administered by a small council of members (perhaps about 5 councilors) selected by lottery. One of the primary tasks of the small council is to elect an executive of the fund and review the executive’s performance. It is far more efficient to let a small council perform this task; 5 people doing a performance review is vastly more efficient than demanding 20 people (assuming 20 participants) perform a performance review.
If your fund manages to grow, I would suggest adding more and more councilors to the small council up to 25 councilors, to say manage 200 members. Eventually, I would even do away with voting all-together, and instead rely on the small council to make donation choices. With the same justifications as above, a small council would be far more efficient at the task. Moreover, councils are capable of deliberation, assigning roles/tasks, so that the council can make better informed decisions than voters.
In contrast, voters need to make tradeoffs. A voter might devote more time towards working and generating more revenue for the fund, in exchange for less informed voting on what ought to be funded. Sortition mitigates these kinds of tradeoffs by increasing decision making efficiency by several factors.