Uploaded May 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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Talk by Leonora Camner, Liz Barry

socallinuxexpo.org/scale/23x/presentations/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.