[ripe-list] RIPE Working Group Chair Collective Meeting Summary

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