Technical societies increasingly struggle with governance capture by large corporations and entrenched interests, especially in news deserts where transparency is low. This talk presents an actionable, open-governance alternative: sortition, or democratic lotteries. Drawing from real-world examples, including the lottery-selected board of Democracy Without Elections, we explore how engineering and professional organizations can use stratified random selection to build representative, trustworthy, transparent, and conflict-resistant leadership structures. Participants will learn concrete steps to implement a sortition-based board or committee within their own organizations.
Liz Barry, Executive Director of MetaGov, will discuss technology as infrastructure for self-rule, and collective self-governance in a digital age, with assistive technology not replacing human judgment, but expanding our capacity to determine our fates together. Technology only strengthens democracy when the tools themselves are publicly governed. The trajectory is clear: open-source tools shift power from corporate control toward public sovereignty. Liz will also discuss how these principles are essential to legitimate governance: 1. Make participation the default, not the exception. 2. Build listening infrastructure at scale. 3. Coordinate across silos. 4. Design for capture resistance. And 5. Start deliberately, institutionalize based on evidence.
Leonora Camner, Executive Director of Democracy Without Elections, will discuss how lottery-based governance may seem like a surprising concept, but history and modern practice have shown it to be a powerful way to increase representation, fairness, and effectiveness. Randomness eliminates political factions and tactics, and instead puts a statistically valid cross-section of people directly at the decision-making table. Through deliberation and facilitated dialogue, people (who often have diverse perspectives and backgrounds) are able to bridge divides and come together to deliver solutions. Organizations that implement this as a practice benefit from reduced internal politics, a fundamentally fairer and more representative governance system, truly open and transparent practices, and better decision-making from the aggregate of more diverse perspectives (the wisdom of the crowd).
