I mentioned sortition to a friend the other day, and he had never heard of it. I caught myself before I told him to google it - you know, since #google has apparently turned their search engine over to garbage AI - and took ten seconds to explain it myself. #sortition

@jerry @corbin
It was a Citizens Jury, not govt per se (even then govt are not always bad). Average people spent weeks with experts from both sides following a Royal Commission (fancy word for 'report') was conducted.

The nuclear lobby tried and failed here, for good reason.

Citizen's Juries are the things that people want for more #decisionMaking because they are less prone to corporate capture. Like politicians.

See also #sortition

@seb321 @pdh @Radical_EgoCom yes, it's been good to see #sortition / #CitizenJuries being taken seriously in some quarters in the last few years or so!

Various successful experiments and so on.

@JoBlakely Very interesting. i never heard of #sortition before. Seems to me worthy of investigation as are people's assemblies and other means of direct democracy. Seems to me a lot of ideas lile this one should be got out there in cyber space so as we can all start getting our heads around alternatives to the status quo.

@marcelias it’d be a lot simpler and more equitable to just pick people at random. #sortition

@ciaranmak @sinabhfuil @karlstanley it’s bad incentives like this that makes me think there should be at least one house chamber chosen by lot. In any country with parliamentary democracy, this is not country specific. #Sortition, in other words. Each person serves for 2-3 years, no repeats, replace the cohort on a rolling basis (not all at once). Could replace the upper house/senate, or be a third house providing checks and balances.

@JoBlakely

I think the USA exposes these failings of "oligarchical democracy" best. In the money spent on elections, in populism, and also deeply rooted in the constitution with politically biased oligarch-appointed supreme court justices for life. The result is the worst possible State structure, even though the founding fathers and even the towering intellect of Thomas Paine felt they were doing the best they could at the time.

#politics #government #sortition #democracy #democratic #peoplepower

"To an ancient Greek democrat (of any stripe), all our modern democratic systems would count as 'oligarchy'."

Paul Cartledge on #sortition

https://greekreporter.com/2023/05/27/ancient-greeks-democracy-oligarchy/

@jwildeboer obligatory mention of #citizensassembly #sortition - gets you true diversity/representation out of the box, the most significant axis being that nine of them are politicians!

(I'm actually just looking through your TL for that thread you made about cookies... Did I pass it already?)

Power to the one who doesn't want it - In the GFCast I talked about the advantages of democracy by #sortition

https://de.player.fm/series/gfcast-der-podcast-uber-achtsame-kommunikation/ep-106-power-to-the-one-who-doesnt-want-it-burgerrate-als-moglichkeit-zur-aktiven-mitgestaltung-der-gesellschaft

“What were created in Western Europe and North America were ‘elective aristocracies‘.“

Nick Coccoma on the new book of Yves Sintomer: „The Government of Chance: Sortition and Democracy from Athens to the Present“

https://nickcoccoma.substack.com/p/here-comes-everybody

#sortition #citisensassembly

#Sortition - a must in democracy. Online conference on 17 April with Dimitri Courant and testimonies from the French municipalities of Poitiers, Saint-Médard-en-Jalles and Le-Plateau-des-petites-roches

https://www.evenements-frequencecommune.fr/home/3099/rencontre/13989

RT @Hugh_Pope
A breakthrough for #sortition as @lemondefr salutes the "serious work" of France's latest randomly selected citizens' assembly on the end of life and calls for more subjects to be tackled with such "collective intelligence" and "enlightened debate".

https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2023/04/04/fin-de-vie-gouvernement-et-parlementaires-doivent-respecter-le-debat-eclaire_6168201_3232.html

@rbreich What do you think about #Sortition or #CitizenJuries as a distant solution to the money in politics problem?
https://youtu.be/12V9rV_bp_M

Congratulations @Hugh_Pope for all the work to edit your late father's gem of a book.

I had a chance to read it pre-publication and was genuine in my endorsement.

If you'd like an introduction to the history and practice of #sortition and deliberative assemblies 👇
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RT @Hugh_Pope
It's PUBLICATION DAY for The Keys to Democracy!

In a lovely and generous Foreword, @Yale's @landemore says my late father Maurice Pope wrote "a visionary…
https://twitter.com/Hugh_Pope/status/1633091833243881474

@damemagazine @KarlBode we have to make our own media, which of course you are doing. If we are going to get to implement any of the solutions you mention or dozens of others from a decade of National Conferences for Media Reform, we need to build up a network from the grassroots.

One way is for every movement and group trying to get messages out to collaborate— with democratically made editorial decisions, #sortition style.

#VisionsUnite is an attempt to build tooling for this approach.

@darius @ntnsndr @jalcine @emi @LeoSammallahti @schock @mattcropp

And #sortition (representation chosen at random) should be part of the governance; if not for an oversight board or improvements prioritization committee, than in a lightweight #VisionsUnite style to share the work of deciding what messages ought to go to the whole polity, to all the people who are members and deserve equal opportunity to influence decisions.

@Thalslaw oh that's interesting! I feel like people being wrong on the facts is much more easily solved than being "wrong" on ideology or creed?

If the people in charge simply do not believe people should have housing or education provided for them, it does not much matter if their estimate for the number of children is 2 billion off.

Whereas people who want to provide homes and schools for everyone can find the UN population figures once in charge! Promis of #sortition

@roag505 I've blathered on way too long.

Again, hugely interested in what you come up with.

If you want to try 'taking turns', selecting moderators at random from all people willing to play that role (in academic literature, a form of sortition), we are building that for #VisionsUnite and would gladly try to plug into Mastodon.

More on #sortition making it possible for anyone to be a leader, it's practiced in some Adivasi communities in India among other places https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/dech.12651

@Thalslaw source request on more arbitrary democracies performing better! Even if it is not #sortition per se, which just came up in another thread, i'd be very interested in the citations for that