On Tue, Feb 09, 2021 at 01:29:46PM +0000, Jim Reid wrote: > You’re right that participation levels are low but there is no > practical way to improve that. If there was, it would have been done. > We can’t force people to post to the lists or come to meetings or > submit policy proposals. This is a much, much wider problem in > society. Countries can’t even get enough of their citizens to vote in > elections.
Since you brought it up, I would like to point out that there is still the practice of sortition - election of representative bodies by random choice of the represented. The USA select their juries like this. A democratic legislature might work by a "vote or go in the random pool" system where the non-voter percentage of parliament is filled by random choice from the people who didn't vote. However, this generally relies on a duty to actually perform the role when randomly selected, and I don't think this can be implemented for RIPE. (Same "force people" problem.) It also only works for representative bodies with a size large enough to statistically smooth out the randomness, not for singular positions or decisions. That said, I still wanted to point out the existance of this scheme, since I very much agree with you that participation in democratic entities is a huge problem in need of some good thinking about. Cheers, -David
