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