>Do you think there is a situation where selected random people do not want to be in office/leadership and want to pursue their own passion/career and thus due to this reason may do a bad job? Is this mandatory?
I think a robust way to design the assembly (or multiple assemblies like with Bouricius’s model) is to have many different people serving different term lengths. Some people may serve a term of only a couple days or weeks. Others might serve for years.
For short-term service, I would make that mandatory. Everyone is required to come.
For long term service, maybe those should be voluntary.
As far as incentives go, there’s a range of enforcement options for “mandatory” service. Perhaps you can just pay a big fine, as a percentage of your income, as an alternative to service. There probably ought to be mechanisms to defer service so you can time things a bit better with your life circumstances.
The typical Citizens’ Assembly will also offer benefits such as child care, parental care.
A high paying salary will encourage the lower and middle class to participate.
I have trouble coming up with ways to help small business owners to participate though. Could a small business owner drop their work for an entire year, even if it was well paid—especially if the small business is so small there are no managers to cover their role? Perhaps there could be alternatives for them, such as part time work coupled with work-from-home.
>What are some nuances about population and diversity? (I am not sure yet)
I have yet to hear about a case where Deliberative decision making techniques were tried and failed due to excessive diversity or cultural factors. I’m not an expert on the latest and greatest research here so I may be wrong. I do know that deliberation experiments have been performed all around the world, including East Asia, Africa, and India.
An example deliberative poll was performed in Uganda, paper linked here:
I haven’t fully read this yet. Note that James Fishkin is the guy that performs and advocates for these “deliberative polls”.
Here’s my solution to your problem. Small major donors should collectively organize together and make decisions democratically.
I would therefore expand the donor lottery into a democratic committee. Instead of selecting only 1 participant, select ~10 participants, similar to jury duty. With more participants, we enjoy more diverse opinion and a better representative sample (Yes 10 is a terrible sample, but it’s way better than 1. If the number of members in the pool increase, the sample size should be increased). More people also facilitate better deliberative discussion and information sharing.
The rationale of a lottocratically selected committee is also different from a donor lottery. Lottocratic committees have democratic legitimacy (often called “sortition”). They are created similarly to how jury pools are created, with similar democratic credentials.
As the sample size of the committee increases, it becomes more and more legitimate as a representative statistical sample of the donor membership.
The tradeoff is cost. A lottocratic body of 10 is 10 times more costly than a body of 1. But it’s also much more efficient than individual action. Imagine 50 people are in your pool. A lottocratic body of 10 reduces cognitive load by 5x. In my opinion, the body of 10 will also make better decisions than a single temporary dictator.
A variety of reasons why collective decisions are often better include:
The practice of deliberative democracy—Deliberation can produce better informed results.
Division of labor—Effective committees can organize research tasks and divide up cognitive labor to enhance decision making.
Condorcet’s Jury Theorem—Greater number of participants increases decision accuracy.
Median voter theorem—Greater number of participants activate the possibility of tending towards the median preferences of the pool.
A single winner in contrast invites chaos to charitable selections, and is unrepresentative of the whole.