Nick Troiano

I'm also, frankly, interested in what may not be a reform that requires a change in law or state constitutions, but how do we think about other ways we do democracy outside of an electoral context?

And there's a growing movement around deliberative democracy and citizen assemblies, which are essentially randomly assembled groups of citizens that can deliberate on issues and make recommendations to government.

I think there are interesting ways where they can actually be integrated into the government.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, and this goes back to Athenian democracy.

I mean, this is not a new idea.

This is actually how democracy was done in the very early days.

And I think this could be even more important as our information ecosystem is transformed and in many ways polluted and distorted by artificial intelligence.

How do we protect the spaces in which democracy can be done?

There are local communities.

In fact, here in Montrose, Colorado, and Fort Collins have done citizen assemblies.

How does it work?

People will approach it in different ways.

The sort of ideal way is a process of what they call sortition, which is random selection of citizens.

They are...

They incentivize for participation, like compensated for their time, but they might meet a few times on a weekend over the course of a few weeks.

They're presented with information and arguments from different perspectives on an issue.

And then they deliberate in a facilitated way together to render a particular recommendation or perspective that then, say, goes to the city council.

Is it binding?