Association Pour la Rotation Et la Sortition (L’APRES)

Posted on January 12, 2021 by rcaze

This post was written by NemoNihilis one of the co-founder of l’APRES (not my pseudonym). Come and visit our website https://sortition.fr

The goal of this association is to turn debates into discussions. Our objective is meta-political, that is to say we discuss the politic of how to do politic in order to promote diversity. We aim to provide tools for people fed up by a discourse monopolized by those who speak the loudest, or absent of the voices of those with less self assurance and crucially. We offer two solutions to these problems.

I. Rotating moderation

The moderator gives the floor to people asking to speak, or request to hear someone’s opinion. However, their work doesn’t end there and they can also choose to keep or change the topic(s) of discussion.

Traditionally, a group would elects a single moderator for the entire meeting, but our association proceeds differently. We rotate the role every X (often 20) minutes or less because the moderator can choose to end their mandate anytime even before it begins. It is then the turn of the person to their left to take over this role.

What about sortition in all of this? This step can be skipped if the first moderator is arbitraraly chosen. Otherwise, we will use sortition to designate the first moderator. For that, we can caste a dice. Another solution is to use RANDOM.org which is particularly useful for a Jitsi or Discord discussion. In this case, we rank people in alphabetical order by their name.

II. An impermanent board designated using chance

The article.7 of our statutes precisely defines the process

The board is staffed by people elected for a year maximum and mandates are not renewable (to ensure rotation)
A member of the board can interrupt its mandate at any time
We use drawing lots to select members composing the board (to ensure sortition). As long as there are vacancies on the board, a random draw will be held.