Wonderful. Well, it's it's great to be here with y'all. I've been excited about this since first connected with Nathan a few months ago. I as as Nathan said, I come out of, you know, the democracy space. I've been in the space for about thirteen years now. I don't pretend to know much about online governance or platform governance, but but I I will say that the work that I'm involved with, I do consider to be quite meta when it comes to governance. And so that I hope that that, you know, our discussion today will be useful for you all as you think about and and rethink, you know, approaches and challenges for self governance in the digital space. And, you know, Nathan mentioned citizens panels, citizens assemblies, you know, sortition democratic lotteries. Just to get a sense, is there is there anyone in this space who isn't familiar with those? Because most people outside of the space are not familiar with those these these concepts. Don't be shy. Alright. So I've I've come home. And so so a bit about my background, I spent years working with Democratic Lotteries to reinvent, you know, leadership and civic development in schools. I was also part of the first coordinating body of Democracy r and d, which is kind of the global network of organizations and institutions and practitioners working with democratic lotteries to form citizens assemblies and citizens panels all around the world. And my colleagues in Democracy R and D r and d, they do great work. It's mostly taking a top down approach. And so it was a few years ago that I helped start of by four, and we take a very bottom up approach to this type of change and this big vision. Our mission is to free America from politicians, the parties, and kind of all of the BS that comes with elections so that we can have a government that works and that actually does right by us as a people. And one of the main ways that we plan to do that is by replacing elections with democratic lotteries. And so you're all familiar with democratic lotteries. I do wanna go through kind of some of the the the key the key reasons why they hold so much promise when we think about democracy. And they may be presented in ways that that that you haven't heard before as as we talked about in the opening for those who just just come in, there have been some issues with the way that we kind of share the good word around these ideas. So I'm gonna go through these real quickly. But first, I wanted to kind of there's gonna be a lot of talk about representatives, and I wanna be clear on what I mean when I talk about representatives. I'm not talking about the executive branch. I'm not about presidents or, you know, governors, mayors, city managers, CEOs, and the like. Talking about representatives in a legislative context. And if we think about this on a meta level, to me, what representatives are supposed to do in a legislative context is answer questions of values, principally questions of values on our behalf. Right? So you have, you know, these questions of how do we wanna live together, what rules do we wanna live by, you know, how do we wanna spend our tax money. And we have experts and affected stakeholders that provide testimony about different issues. We have staff that drafts legislation, and our representatives are supposed to wrestle with the pros and cons, think about what's important to us, and make the final call on our behalf. That's that's the way it's generally supposed to work on a meta level, and then the executive branch is supposed to go off and make it happen, to go do the day to day running of things. And yet we know that the the so called representatives that we elect oftentimes don't do that. They don't represent us in that way. And to me, democratic lotteries is a powerful tool to correct that, and that's because democratic lotteries do three very important things very well. The first thing that they do is they cut out the division that inevitably comes with electoral campaigns. Right? There's there's no attack ads. There's no debates where people are shouting and taking cheap shots. The media and social media has no incentive to kind of stir anger and fear to pit us as voters against one another. There's no campaigns. There's not even a clear role for political parties because none of that matters with the lottery. Right? And, obviously, there would still be factions. I'm not saying that there would not be factions, but it dialed things down quite a bit when factions are no longer, you know, vying for power in, you know, what is like, basically, a cutthroat popularity contest and one that's increasingly being referred to in this country as total war. Right? And so lotteries cut that out. The second thing that they do very well is give us real representation. Right? And so lotteries call on the service of everyday Americans. And I don't usually get this technical, but given this crowd, I can just say they use stratified sampling to try to make sure that every group is reflective of the population. We're not talking We're not talking about statistical represent representation. Sometimes there's groups that are large enough to try to go for something like that, but generally reflective of the population so that a legislative body has you know, shares the same values, the same struggles, the same hopes, and and and same perspectives and lived experiences as the population they're supposed to represent and actually even look like the population. You have young and old. You have rich and poor. You have men and women and and all the different races and and demographic representation. And so that is something that elections never give us and, quite frankly, can never give us because they advantage certain characteristics and discriminate against others. And a lot of those characteristics actually aren't the characteristics needed to govern well, especially democratically in a body with other people. The the characteristics needed to be, you know, the center of an effective campaign run by a campaign manager. So real representation. And the third thing that democratic voters do really well is they curb corruption. They do this in two different ways. The most obvious is that they cut out a lot of the corruption that comes with campaigns. So when representatives are selected by lottery, they don't owe their position or their power to anyone or anything. They don't owe it to any party, to any donors, or to any endorsements. And so when they come in, they're free from the typical political debts and pressures that that have our representatives often in the pocket of very powerful players by the time that they even reach office. And importantly, in a system based on democratic lotteries, you can curb corruption after representatives have been selected as well because legislative bodies selected by lottery can make decisions via a secret ballot. And it's hard to kind of overstate the importance of this because what it does is it it makes it so that political parties or factions cannot enforce that representatives need to follow a party line. They're using a secret ballot when they go to vote on the issues. And it also dries up the incentive of powerful special interest to try to, you know, intimidate or blackmail or usually bribe, both in legal and illegal ways, representatives to try to get their vote on key issues. It's it's the way it worked when it comes to us going to polls as voters. The Secret ballot does that for us. And elections can't do that. They need to have, you know, a a public voting rule if you're gonna have any pretense of accountability. Right? And what happens with elections is they use the public voting rule as as an ineffective and often disastrous way to try to correct the, you know, principal agent problem that elections create. It doesn't work in practice. We know that that really the groups that can really hold representatives accountable to doing their bidding are the party that got them there and the special interests who pay for their campaigns. They're the ones who can check the voter the voting records to make sure that that the representatives kept their side of the bargain. But supposedly, it's for us to be able to hold them to account every two years. But democratic lotteries are based on

different concept of representation. Right? One one that doesn't suffer from the same type of principal agent problem, especially when you when you have firm, like, term limits. Right? They represent us because they are like us. They are just like us. They come from the same places. And after their turn in government, they will return living just down the street from me, working alongside of me, and they'll have to live with the consequences of their decision the same way we will. They're not looking forward to a career in politics or in lobbying such that they could sell us out and actually do pretty well for themselves. And so they can we don't have to hold them accountable in the same way, just like you wouldn't have to hold a mechanic accountable if he was working on his own car. And so they can make decisions via secret ballot, And that virtually eliminates the market for trying to influence them, since you don't know if they would ever hold up their side of a bargain or a backroom deal. So those are the three main things that democratic lotteries do very well. They, you know, they cut out the division that inherently comes from elections. They give us real representation, and they can dramatically curb corruption by cutting out the two main vectors of corruption in our current politics. And they do all of this at scale. So lotteries are you know, they use sampling, which is specifically designed to to handle large populations. And we can also use lotteries to select as many different legislative bodies as we would want to so that they could actually specialize on complex issues and so that we can be more creative in the ways that we separate power. It's something that you can't do with lottery or with elections because elections don't scale very well. Things get really messy really fast when you're when you're relying on campaigns and voters trying to wrap their heads around all the different candidates. And all of a sudden, you go from a country where you had one representative at the federal level for every 50,000 Americans to where you have one for every 600,000 Americans. And there's increasing distance between people and misinformation, and it breaks down. Lotteries don't suffer from that type of problem of scale. Now it's obviously not a silver bullet. It has its own challenges. Principally, what is talked about is the the very real possibility of a heightened role and power for legislative staff. Right? There are, you know, solvable problems around institutional memory when it comes to staggered terms and these types of things. There are also, you know, infinite ways that a system like this will be able to be improved and iterated on. No system is perfect. There will certainly be bugs to be worked out and vulnerabilities to be patched. But it is our view that on day one, a system based on lottery would be fundamentally better, would be miles ahead from the dumpster fire politics that we have right now from a first principle standpoint. And so we conducted a democratic lottery back in September. I'll actually share my screen here to show you a little bit. I'll give you a sense. You can find us on our website. I'll share the link afterwards, but we did a lottery back in September to form the Citizens Panel on COVID-nineteen. We have a video here. We live streamed this. We worked with a group of computer scientists from Harvard and Carnegie Mellon called Panalot, and they've developed an open source algorithm for doing the stratification in a democratic lottery in a way that tries to be the fairest possible to the different folks in the pool, some of which have less chance of being selected because of the the the demographics of the pool. So you can check it out. This was the first time we did the first time ever that the democratic lottery was conducted Powerball style. We did it live streamed over the internet and had folks who were in the pool tuning in to see if they were selected to serve. We did this panel on COVID in the state of Michigan. So we took the most charged issue in the most divided state, and we brought them together for six weeks over Zoom during October and November. And you'll probably remember what was going on in October and November. This was a very charged time. And in their own state, while they were in session, there was a uncovered a plot to kidnap their governor. The president had COVID. The the national presidential election was contested in their state. And it seemed like the crazier politics got all around them, the more firmly they held to their task of working together to represent their fellow, you know, Michiganders. Here you can see Hi. The 30 folks that we brought together from all walks of life. And you can check it out when you hover over. There's some problems with Safari you have to click, but when you hover over

You can see people introduce themselves and you get a little bit sense about where they come from.

Hi. My name is Amanda.

And you can also see the breakdown of how they compare to the population where we use census projections and some of the the most reliable point down we could find on state of Michigan. So you can see, you know, how the panel compares to Michigan in terms of people's political leanings. I've got Zoom's bar in front of me, so I can't quite see. In terms of geography, you know, their views on COVID, schooling, race, gender, and age. These were the main things that we control for when we did the stratification. So we brought them together. They were able to, you know, generate their own questions and some with their own agenda. And then they called on expert testimony, across, you know, a range of different experts, conflicting testimony in the health and economic spaces. And they developed a set of 12 policy recommendations that you can find on our website as well, put into the form of a report. And what we found was, like you see in citizens assemblies and citizens panels all around the world, they didn't agree on everything, but they mostly agreed on most things. And they respected one another and came to care for each other in the process, all while the electoral politics around them was tearing this country apart in a lot of ways. And so right now we're working on a documentary that is gonna give you all a, you know, close-up intimate view of the journey, the transformative journey of these citizen representatives as they work together to try to find common ground. And we're also our next step for us, see, our goal is not government by citizens panel. That's not what we're proposing, or that we do a bunch more citizens panels. As I've mentioned, we're focused on replacing legislative elections with democratic lotteries in a very real way. But the idea with the citizens panel, why we did this was to give America a glimpse of the type of vision that we're talking about. I'll stop sharing my screen here. To give America a glimpse of the vision that we're talking about so that they can see it for themselves. Because what we found is is that when Americans are shown this vision, there is a sizable chunk that are on board right away. There's a smaller piece that is not having it, and there's a big part in the middle that really wants to believe in this vision. They're really open to it. They support it. But when push comes to shove, what we find is that people have to see it first to believe it. There has been a lot of myths instilled into us about the capacity of everyday people to govern ourselves. And so our goal with Citizens Panel is is to show people firsthand what we're talking about. And our next iteration will be doing America's first national citizens assembly, so much larger, longer process. These 30 folks had about forty hours together in total online, never meeting together, in person. But this citizens assembly will be in person. It'll be a 100 Americans selected by lottery from across the country, and they're gonna go through the full legislative arc on a single issue that has divided this country for a long time and that Congress has failed to address. And and that includes fielding, you know, diverse expert testimony, working through differences, and with the help of staff and policy experts, developing a fully fleshed bill to then present to the American public. And so that for us is the next iteration, continuing to to bring this into higher and higher fidelity and to tell the story of that to the American public. When it comes to the potential of democratic lotteries outside of traditional government or citizens panels, citizens assemblies, We're seeing you know, I know firsthand that this can transform in really powerful ways things like student government. That's where I've spent a lot of time in the past as well. There are a lot of calls to use this to revolutionize representation in unions, in co ops, in networks of nonprofits who, you know, espouse democratic values, really anywhere where elections are being used kind of as a default option. People are wanting to have democratic representation and running into problems of division, problems that their decision making bodies actually aren't representative of the rank and file or of the full community and problems of corruption and distrust. And so with that, I'm really excited to to hear from you all and have a conversation about how this may or may not, you know, fit within problems of, you know, Internet platform governance and, yeah, and and and just to connect over this.

K. Great.

Yeah. I'm happy to take over facilitating. I wasn't sure if you meant immediately or in the future, but I guess it was immediate. So I'm looking through the questions just to get a sense. I think the first one, we had Colin from this organization called Polis. I don't know if you know about them, come speak. And Josh has asked sort of Colin and Polis were talking about, you know, still being pro elections, but reforming that process in a certain way where it seems like you're potentially more of an abolitionist in terms of what we should do with existing elections. Is that a fair characterization of your your point of view?

Yes. That is. That is. And and I wanna be clear about the distinction between legislative elections and and elections for executive positions. Although, you know and and that's kind of its own conversation. There are, proposals that we support as far as transforming the way that we select executive roles using lotteries, but it's a very different approach. And so you'd be looking at, you know, citizens commission selected by lotteries that spend a year headhunting the most qualified, you know, administrators and leaders in the public and private space, vetting them, interviewing them, nominating them, and potentially even directly selecting them instead of a circus national election, you know, or nominating them to then not have campaigns, but simply present themselves to the American public and have, an election between, you know, five can't miss candidates. So there's that side of things. And then when it comes to the legislative side of things, we are abolitionists. For the reasons that we talked about there, and also personally from a standpoint of I find that elections, the framework of elections is inherently pretentious and paternalistic. I think that it that it denigrates and degrades the human capacity for self governance. And it's based on a model supposedly that we select the best and brightest to to make the decisions for us. That isn't actually how it plays out. And instead, we get a a lot of people who aren't like us, who aren't in the same boat as us, don't you know, who who who can do quite well for themselves if they sell themselves out. And and and we're told that they're the ones who need to decide for us, that that we are kind of more like children and we can't decide for ourselves kind of the direction of this country or the most important issues. And so, yes, we and we also, on top of that, feel like elections are tearing this country apart at the seams. So, yes, we are abolitionists.

Not to jump around too much in the questions, but, you know, there's a couple of questions based on what you just said around this key proposition, a random selection of citizens will be better legislators than elected representatives. And some of them are around, Seth has asked if it makes sense to say all relevant or sorry. Can you make the case that there's no worthwhile expertise in being a legislator that is lost by taking on amateurs in all of these roles? John sort of built on that and asked why the founders believed in random assignments to juries but not to legislatures. I think there are a couple other questions sort of in that regard. So I'd love your take on that.

Yeah. They're great questions. Let me, let me make sure I don't miss anything. So the question of expertise, I think that this connects to a question of qualifications, which we often get. To me, the the expertise that represented in the legislative session is the the lived experience of being Americans and the values that we have in this country or in any population that legislature claims to represent. These are questions of values, and I don't think that there are that there exists anyone in this world that is an expert as to what is best for America in terms of big values questions or what is best for any community. There's no consultant that you can hire that's gonna come in and know the lived experience of single moms or of farmers or of engineers or what it means to be young and black in America. These are not things that an expert with all the expert with all the polling data in the world can tap into and then say, I know the right thing to do for this country. The expertise definitely needs to be part of the process, but experts need to be on top, not on top. They need to testify the same way that they do to our legislatures right now. The people that we elect are not experts on really any of the substantive issues that they legislate on. We don't elect people to go in there because they're experts on health or higher education or foreign policy, and and they're busy making monumental decisions on all of those different areas and then some. They rely on staff. They rely on expert testimony. And everyday folks selected by lottery would also be able to rely on staff and call on expert and stakeholder testimony. The fact is, though, then they have to make the final call on our behalf. And so, we believe that that that they're really the only ones that have the experience and and the true qualifications needed to represent us as everyday people. As far as the founders, I remember that question. It's a good question. It often depends on how you see the founders. I think that they thought that elections would produce the best form of government. It certainly seems to have been a step up over monarchy, although it seems to be dividing us in a way, pitting us against each other in a way that monarchy inherently do. But I think that they saw pretty quickly afterwards when you put theory into practice that it it it had some major problems. I think that Washington's farewell address speaks to how how very quickly he could see that the the dynamic of parties, which was not really on the founder's mind when they were when they were working on the constitution, had already become this very worrying thing in America. 240 later, we can see how this thing has played out. And I think that the founders, had they been able to see what things were gonna happen, I think that they would have embraced lotteries. As was said, they did that in the jury system. You had Thomas Paine calling for that for constitutional conventions. And I think that there's a lot of reasons why founders made the decisions that they did. But I think that the the best thing that we can do to try to live up to American ideals finally, the ideals that they set forward and that we've never reached is is to to rethink the way that we approach representation. I think that there was another question in there that I am missing.

There are a couple, but I think moving on to, like, some of the implementation questions. I'm definitely missing some questions. So, you know, just repaste yours in the chat if I've skipped over it. But there are a couple around how the system will be implemented, particularly one, who is in in charge of random number generation and the attributes and characteristics that are stratified in the sampling, in terms of changing the weighting based on demographics and things like that. So I think that's one side of the implementation. Right? And the other is, how do we start testing this? Like, what's the smallest significant jurisdiction? You mentioned this the COVID panel, but, HOAs or police commissions or things like that. What's the smallest jurisdictions that you're you're thinking would be useful to start testing out these implementations and seeing how this would work?

Yeah. So when it comes to the technical sides of implementation, there's obviously a lot of room to flesh out technical answers, especially as we look at scale and as we look at some of the different, you know, jurisdictions and and kind of resources at our disposal. In some countries, the people have, you know, national ID numbers that aren't sensitive information and others, we don't. And and so how you fill out, you know, you have a representative pool, you know, how you decide the the different demographics to weigh, these are all really important questions. In terms of the actual kind of science behind, you know, random number generation, those types of things, you're gonna have to talk with Panelot and their team there who know a lot more about that than I do. As I as I mentioned, they're they're the ones who develop the open source algorithms. There are heated debates in the space about kind of the the optimum way to go about these things, and they're very important questions. The way it's often thought about is how you make some of these value judgments, right, as far as, like, is it more important if we have to flex, for example, on a specific demographic because, the algorithm is struggling based on the size of the pool and that type of thing? You There's certain value to judgments that need to be made. And what we typically talk about in this space is having those value judgments be made by a different group selected by lottery of everyday folks. And so as we look to plan our citizens assembly, our national citizens assembly, we plan to to, you know, call upon the service of the citizens panel that we did with some of these big value judgment questions so that they're not in the hands of us as kind of, you know, like, bureaucrats behind the scenes. There's a lot more there, obviously. But thinking about these meta levels of governance and how do you have you know, how do you disrupt entrenched power structures and our own biases? And and usually in the space, the answer comes back to have a group selected by lottery make that decision to govern the other layer. Not always possible in a nonprofit context, but certainly when we think about government more broadly and the resources that can be brought to bear, that is that is something to think The second question, I sometimes lose track. Please repeat the second question here.

I think the second

question Implementation. Implementation.

The smallest kind of modular implementation that you think would be significant, which which seems to build off of what you're saying now with expanding the citizens assembly to the national assembly, etcetera.

Yeah. So so first thing I wanna do is challenge the idea that this has to be tested at the smallest scale and then the next scale and the next scale over, say, thirty years until we've worked out all the wrinkles and we have, like, a perfect system before we could ever conceivably think about this as a legitimate challenger to elections. I I just wanna name and I'm not saying that that's that's what what is being brought up here, but it's it's sometimes brought up. And I wanna name that as kind of, like, be careful about the the bias of the status quo because the the system that we have in place has very real consequences every day that we continue with it. And there's questions about this, like, lottery as if this is kind of a newfangled thing. We're talking about as bringing together a microcosm of society so that adults can make decisions together in community even when communities have become too big to do that kind of town hall style. And so the question of kind of testing this out and can it work, there's obviously a lot of you know, the devil's in the details as far as optimizing the system and and patching vulnerabilities and those types of things. But, again, as a first principles standpoint, what we're talking about is bringing adults together to make decisions in community and doing that at scale instead of, you know, trying to elect the best and brightest. The smallest size, you know, as far as implementation and testing and tinkering, you know, there's school boards, which are often reviled by by folks as being filled. Not always, but having a lot of folks who are using that as a first rung in the political ladder, not necessarily there because, thinking about the best interests of students and parents. School boards, police oversight commissions, as you mentioned, and oversight boards, oftentimes co opted by the fact that folks might be from that community, but looking to kind of break their way out of that community and and developing relationships with city government and police and that type of thing. We also look at at city councils, although they would often have to be expanded a little bit to actually be reflective of the population. On our part, what we're looking at doing as far as testing and iterative improvement, because this is very important. We just don't want it to be the kind of perfect is the enemy of the good when we talk about how fast to move with these things in light of what's going on with our politics. The way that we wanna approach that is by fleshing this out independently. And so we're gonna do a national citizens assembly, and what we're looking at doing is eventually independently convening and financing a standing citizen's body that could rival the legitimacy of congress from, you know, from a a moral authority standpoint. And it would be an opportunity to work through and iterate on design free from the constraints of often very bureaucratic systems where you're working on the timelines of, you know, citizens' initiative processes and and challenges in the courts and those types of things. And so what we're looking to do is kind of just build it out ourselves and and show people how this works.

I think on that, Seth has put reportedly a million more implementation questions in the chat. Just wanted to turn it over to you to to ask the top ones that you still wanna get to after this discussion.

It's a great question. And, on our website, we we have a link to some of the polling that we did. We we did some national polling with, one of the highest rated polling firms in the country called SurveyUSA. And we we put this question we even put the question of constitutional change to replace congressional elections with lotteries to, you know, close to 2,000 Americans. And what we saw was is that there is majority support in every sub demographic of the country, and support is virtually equal amongst conservatives and liberals. There's even more support amongst independents and kind of that that exhausted majority. And we're talking about two thirds of the country that is supportive of this idea, and only about 12% thinks that it would be worse or much worse, and then the rest are undecided. And the the only kind of real statistically significant difference amongst different groups of people that jumps out is that this is still, on the whole, supported, but less so the more education and income that people have. And having canvassed and talked with over 400 folks across 10 different states in some of the richest, most well-to-do neighborhoods and and also some of the most marginalized neighborhoods and in in rural areas, I kind of attribute that to the smarter than the average bear phenomenon and and a lot of the socialization that we have been fed around kind of myths of everyday people and also some of the, you know, the mysticism around policy and this this idea that that this is you know, that what goes on in Washington is just too too complex for the average person to wrap their head around. That may be true of all the politics that's played, when you take a lot of that out of there, I I think that that's something that we need to challenge head on. But, yeah, it's it's generally it's accepted widely across the spectrum. But what it comes down to, you know, as far as pitching this to to to different groups, I find that, you know, the different advantages around corruption and around division and around real representation stuff, those only matter if you're open to the idea if you if you like the idea. They don't matter if you don't like the idea. And, really, the only determining factor that I've consistently found as to whether or not people embrace this idea or or or it makes them really uneasy is how they feel about everyday people. The rest, if they don't trust everyday people to govern ourselves and and to make our own decisions, then no amount of advantages around corruption, around division, or around what have you will make any difference. That segment of the society, which I think is, I attribute that to conscious and unconscious elitism, They're just not happening. And and they they're fed up with the current system, but they'd rather they they think that we need to have, you know, these these kind of elite politicians even though we can't trust them, and that we we could never really hand this over to everyday people.

I'm gonna use my recently conferred surprise moderated privileges to ask my own question here, which is, you know, I I was just wondering what you think is the strongest argument you've heard kind of against this way of thinking or anything that I think there's a lot of arguments as you've mentioned that might be founded on subconscious or or explicit elitism or a belief that things can change or whatever. But what do you think is sort of, if any, the strongest argument against this position, whether that's for a particular jurisdiction, like this type of decision should not be made by a citizen assembly that you were on board with or just about the the general idea?

Yeah. I mean, the first thing that comes to my mind is is just going back to, like, we do not support the use of lotteries to fill positions that require special skills and experience, period. We just we just fervently disagree that legislators representatives in the legislature need some kind of specialized skill or experience. And, in fact, what they need is lived experience that is diverse and representative. So as I've mentioned, we don't advocate for the use of lotteries to select executive positions. As far as the strongest arguments against it, I mentioned, you know, that, you know, the worry that this would convert more power onto legislative staff, you know, who will have a heightened role in kind of the the institutional memory and some of the day to day kind of aspects of that. I think that that that is a real thing. I think that it's not a real thing right now because we see that, like, so much power is vested in politicians, lobbyists, the parties. And and so it's it's not something that would stop me in my mind from from moving forward with this. There are questions around you know, I know I've talked with people as well around, like, some folks being hesitant to step up when called upon by lottery because not wanting to have, like, their lives or the lives of their loved ones kind of dragged through the mud politically. Again, you know, secret ballot can help that a lot and the fact that they're not campaigning. And what we see is that, like, tons of people actually do step up to do this. So we don't have real concerns about lack of representation in the pool. There's often arguments about, like, you can't get perfect representation. It's true. Nothing's perfect. You can get pretty darn close, and elections can't at all. Really, I mean, we're a hundred years since women, you know, won the right to vote, and, you know, Congress is 25% women, and that's an all time high. You know, there's questions around facilitation. You know, facilitation is is definitely a vulnerability in the system. I don't think anyone in this space envisions that we would just use Robert's rules of order and, you know, the the same kind of, like, broken committee structure that that is used in Congress right now, that is very partisan and dysfunctional. And and when you introduce, you know, different types of facilitation, they can lead to some real breakthroughs. They have some beautiful sight. But oftentimes, that means that there's a lot of power being held in in the hands of facilitators. You know, what they would do in ancient ancient Athens with with that type of thing is they would mix and randomly select facilitators, like, you know or or people to, you know, to to share things right before so that they couldn't be kind of influenced beforehand. But these are challenging questions. There's no doubt. But as I've as I've mentioned and I stand by it, if you believe in the capacity of everyday people to govern ourselves, then from a first principle standpoint, to me that this is just this is a no brainer. This is this is the starting point, and there's a lot of improvement to be had on top of that.

That makes sense. I

I mean, I'd be interested to hear from from you all. Like, what what do you see as the big problems that this presents?

I'm happy to open it up if anyone wants to speak about about that for the last few minutes. I think we have a prayer of getting to all the questions.

I apologize for being verbose. I think I'm probably limiting how many questions we

can get. No. It's great. It means it's a it's an interesting topic for folks. Sorry, Josh. Come on.

Yeah. And it's a it's a it's a great point as far as efficiency and cost, especially when we talk about, like, much smaller scales than say, like, government. There was there was an online platform called Postwaves that a colleague of mine started several years back, ended up closing down. And he he used this kind of jury method to to try to have a self moderating for self moderating forums. Right? So people would be randomly assigned assigned to evaluate new posts for whether or not they're relevant to the group, and only if they reached a certain threshold did they become public to everyone. And I thought it was a great idea, you know, especially when you're talking about, you know, kind of the 80 is it the eighty twenty problem and stuff? There's a lot of folks, myself included, who would just skip and didn't wanna, like, do our job as, you know, as as co moderators in that system. That's different when you're talking about, like, big roles where you'd be paid a salary and these types of things in government. There's a very real consideration for an online platform that a lot of folks might not wanna do their part when called upon to govern in turn. Right? And some of the costs that's involved with that. So I think it's a great point.

And I I'll just quickly state. I can share stats afterwards for people who wanna stick around. But what we found even with the citizens panel is that there there's still a ton of people who who wanna participate, and they're not the usual suspects. So you have quite a representative pool to to to pull from even even when you're an unknown nonprofit sending out about a citizen's panel no one's ever heard of.

Adam, I'm I'm wondering if if you would comment on what I've convinced myself is the people's panel puppet parties. Right? Why can't people right now say I'm running for office based on a pledge that I will obey the dictates of my local panel. And different municipalities or districts can decide that they want to support that candidate, no constitutional amendment required. And it's a way of allowing on a region by region basis people to to do this if if a candidate is willing to be the people's puppet candidate.

John, you have read our mind on some of our strategic thinking long term. And this is some of the strategic think we've done around. Okay. If we're able to build out and you mentioned at a local level, we've been thinking at a national level because some of the scale of of of putting together some of these this type of legislative body, logistically and financially, is actually pretty similar to national level than, say, a state level. You know, if you're talking about a body of a certain size Sure. And you can have much more impact on the public psyche, you know, with with something on that level. And we've talked about, you know, do you run delegate candidates, whose whose only mandate would be to kind of, follow the will of of what's decided in a standing, you know, rival legislative body that does not have direct decision making authority, but does have moral authority in the eyes of most Americans. And, yeah, there are some challenges obviously there, but it seems like a promising avenue of strategic thought for sure.

On that note, I think I'll ask everyone to unmute, and and thank you so much for joining us today. I really hope you will have the bandwidth to join the Slack because I definitely did not make it to a bunch of of the really great questions folks asked, and there's a ton more discussion to be had. So hope to see you there. And, I hope everyone has joined me in a round of applause. Otherwise, this will be awesome.

Today. Appreciate all the questions and the energy. I just put a link to the page on our website about the citizens panel where you can, you know, kind of, you know, dive into your hearts to light. And and, obviously, that also takes you to our website more broadly. And, I don't know what the format is. I'm happy to stick around for a bit and and and kind of, like, continue to chat and stuff, but, it's been wonderful to be with you today.

Great.