Liz Barry is the Executive Director of Metagov.
Before joining Metagov, she served as Head of Partnerships at The Computational Democracy Project, the 501(c)3 organization she established with the creators of the Polis technology to steward its open source code and methods. Liz works with facilitators, social movements, civil society organizations, journalists, indigenous nations, democratic governments both young and old, and peacebuilders to implement "listening at scale." The collaboration began when her presence at Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower Revolution and subsequent relationship with g0v led to her writing up the first coverage of vTaiwan in the west, in the 2016 piece for Civicist titled "vTaiwan: Public Participation Methods on the Cyberpunk Frontier of Democracy," now republished by Taiwan's government.

Presentations

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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.

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