Many of the references and communities I might have suggested have already been listed (e.g. Metagov) so I won’t repeat them (and I’ve also discovered some helpful new ones!).
I have also personally been exploring many these questions at Harvard, focused primarily on governance of FAAMG companies given their impact on our ‘collective cognitive capacity’ to address all global challenges (and particularly catastrophic risks) and their concentration of AI capabilities (and bolstered by their capacity to change quickly and the incredible pressure on them to change).
Caveat: The the audience I’m writing for there is somewhat different from you, even though my personal motivations appear to be similar to yours (my current published work is focused on those who have influence over those organizations; in fact I was actually directed to this post by someone who with significant power in FAAMG org who suggested that I comment.). It does not engage with many of the difficult questions around actual operationalization of sortition at a global scale for overall restructuring of governance (part of my current work). That said, it was meant to lead to (initially private) pilots by FAAMG-like corporations and it is directly doing that. It is one step on the road from that to much more significant governance changes.
I have also dug deep into systems like Polis (e.g. https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis/issues/1289 ), its variants in the private sector, and other relatively novel elicitation/deliberation systems. There is a lot to learn from those and to build upon but also huge amounts of ground that has not been covered (IMHO due to lack of effective messaging and investment for a long time). Language models will also change the possibility space.
Finally, Engineering a Safer World (open access) is interesting on this, and I particularly appreciate this diagram which explores the role of governance in managing a complex system:
Many of the references and communities I might have suggested have already been listed (e.g. Metagov) so I won’t repeat them (and I’ve also discovered some helpful new ones!).
One I didn’t see mentioned is the the work of Claudia Chwalisz and her team at the OECD, which I’ve found immensely valuable—not only their excellent reports, summaries, etc. but an Airtable documenting hundreds of real-world governance experiments around the world (and I’m happy to connect folks into the community of practitioners implementing these new approaches to support significant policy decisions).
I have also personally been exploring many these questions at Harvard, focused primarily on governance of FAAMG companies given their impact on our ‘collective cognitive capacity’ to address all global challenges (and particularly catastrophic risks) and their concentration of AI capabilities (and bolstered by their capacity to change quickly and the incredible pressure on them to change).
In particular, you might find this working paper belfercenter.org/publication/towards-platform-democracy-policymaking-beyond-corporate-ceos-and-partisan-pressure interesting as a sort of advocacy for applying sortition to FAAMG (building on significant empirical literature from others; cited in the paper).
Caveat: The the audience I’m writing for there is somewhat different from you, even though my personal motivations appear to be similar to yours (my current published work is focused on those who have influence over those organizations; in fact I was actually directed to this post by someone who with significant power in FAAMG org who suggested that I comment.). It does not engage with many of the difficult questions around actual operationalization of sortition at a global scale for overall restructuring of governance (part of my current work). That said, it was meant to lead to (initially private) pilots by FAAMG-like corporations and it is directly doing that. It is one step on the road from that to much more significant governance changes.
This might be also be interesting re. brainstorm: Building Wise Systems: Combining Competence, Alignment, and Robustness—a (work in progress) framework re. thinking about ~governance systems.
I have also dug deep into systems like Polis (e.g. https://github.com/compdemocracy/polis/issues/1289 ), its variants in the private sector, and other relatively novel elicitation/deliberation systems. There is a lot to learn from those and to build upon but also huge amounts of ground that has not been covered (IMHO due to lack of effective messaging and investment for a long time). Language models will also change the possibility space.
Finally, Engineering a Safer World (open access) is interesting on this, and I particularly appreciate this diagram which explores the role of governance in managing a complex system: