Bailey Flanigan presents Algorithmic Tools for Targeting Sortition Ideals

Abstract: In the past few years, there has been a flurry of computer science research on sortition, the task of randomly sampling a representative subset of people. This work has so far been primarily applied to choose members of citizens' assemblies, but it could in principle apply to a much broader range of democratic models for direct citizen participation in governance. This talk will describe the key challenges of sortition in practice, and then overview some of the algorithmic tools that have been developed to mitigate these challenges.