Leonora is a nonprofit leader with extensive experience in movement-building and organizing. She currently serves as Executive Director of Democracy Without Elections, a sortition movement-building organization, and Director of Public Access Democracy, a democratic lottery advocacy organization based in Los Angeles. Previously, Leonora was the Executive Director of Abundant Housing LA, a pro-housing movement organization that grew from an all-volunteer group to a staffed organization of 10 under her leadership.

Presentations

23x

Breaking Governance Capture: How Sortition Can Transform Organizations

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, paired with publicly governed digital infrastructure for collective self-rule. Drawing from real-world examples (including the lottery-selected board of Democracy Without Elections and open-source governance work from MetaGov), we explore how engineering and professional organizations can use stratified random selection and participatory technology to build representative, trustworthy, transparent, and capture-resistant leadership structures. Participants will learn concrete steps to implement sortition-based boards or committees supported by legitimate, publicly governed tools.

See Presentation