leff@smu.UUCP (11/19/83)
#N:smu:16500002:000:2951 smu!leff Nov 17 12:05:00 1983 At a large food coop to which my mother belonged to, they had an interesting form of government. Meetings were every month to which all members were invited. They could vote on anything they wanted. OF the 1000 members, only about 20 showed up. Some attended every meeting. Other members attended a few members and got bored and still others attended meetings on topics they were interested in. It worked quite well with small meetings that were not unwieldy. People didn't feel they were mis-represented and anybody who felt strongly enough about a meeting could do something. Probably it would be necessary to have some regulation preventing a small group from making a controversal and major decision without advance notice. I don't remember whether the coop did. This mechanism might be useful for moderate sized towns, non profit organizations and shareholders of a company especially when kept in a local group. I don't think this would work on a national sized organization such as the U. S. government. We would need some scheme based on electronic voting, etc. ONe possibility might be random representation. Let's take an example of consumer oriented agencies, FDA, EPA etc. that have very direct effects on people's lifes. Instead of having paid experts or worse bureacrats make decisions have a jury. The jury which might be relatively large would decide whether a drug should be allowed on the market, the plant should be closed down or should be allowed to pollute in order to maintain needed jobs, etc. The jury would be chosen by random selection and the only people who might be eliminated would be those having a conflict of interest. If the size is large enough, then that would not be necessary since the votes of one or two people randomly chosen would not be likely to effect the outcome. THey would of course listen to the expert opinions of the employees of the agency, volunteers, people who had been subpoenaed, the affected industry etc. The size of the jury and the number of people needed to make a decision would be chosen on the basis of statistical considerations. The idea behind the jury is that one should be reasonably sure given the number of people voting yes or no that a majority of the total population would vote the same way. The criteria of certainty would be based on the importance of the decision. Closing down a $10,000,000 plant would require a smaller certainty than closing down a $100,000,000 plant. The size of the jury would be based on the theory of design of experiments. If one had a larger jury, one would be more likely to have a decision that could be used to deduce that the entire population would vote the same way given the opportunity to do so. The size of the jury would be larger if a more expensive hearing is involved, i. e. the cost would be higher if the decision is not by a sufficiently large plurality to give a conclusion as the entire population.