How to Fund a Movement for Sortition?

6 Responses

Yoram Gat, on November 18, 2024 at 8:01 pm said:

In my opinion the bigger question, or at least the more urgent one, is how should a pro-sortition organization (if there was one) spend its money (if it had any).

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johnhuang865, on November 18, 2024 at 9:13 pm said:

Yoram,

I would spend money to create grassroots, democratically run nonprofits to ensure that your money is not in control of some oligarchy.

I would spend the money on marketing, advertising, “education”, “public awareness building”. I would spend it on staff. I would dangle money in front of Youtubers, podcasters, and influencers and tell them to cover this subject. I would buy more access to more Op-Eds in newspapers. I would spend money on small scale experimentation. This is the alleged “grassroots approach”, getting the masses into the movement. We can only do this through mass media communication, which costs lots of money.

I would spend money to make more money. I would spend the money to host fundraising events. This is what “public awareness building” entails. The bigger the event, the more people, the better. It is not a waste to do this. Every big extravagant event informs more people about the existence of this thing. That’s what we want, huge growth. We need to pour money into marketing and fundraising to produce growth.

The alternative “grass-tops” approach is using the money to hire lobbyists to lobby city and local governments using the moniker of “I’m a problem solver”.

Moreover if any pro-sortition organization can’t think of anything to do with their money, the answer is easy. Throw your money into investments. Come back in a couple years and voila, you probably have more money. If it takes you a couple years to decide what to do, that isn’t a problem, you can afford to wait.

Once we have a sufficient mass of income, then I would target a specific locality. I don’t care where, it could be anywhere in the world. Target that place, then spend all of the money raised all around the world right at that small town. Spend in on some sort of ballot resolution, on mass marketing to convince the people there to adopt sortition. If that fails, we can target another town or try again.

Once a small locality is finally convinced to adopt sortition, we can spend even more money getting some universities and academics to study sortition and hopefully sing its praises. If we find that sortition was actually crap all along, that’s it for me, I’m off this train. Otherwise, we can use this example of success to further promote sortition all around the world.

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Yoram Gat, on November 22, 2024 at 10:47 am said:

I would spend it on marketing, advertising, “education”, “public awareness building”.

This is mostly rather vague, but seems to boil down to different forms of advertising. Are “education” and “public awareness building” forms of advertising or something else?

Regarding advertising: which advertising avenues would you use? What would be the content? How would you evaluate the impact to know that your advertising is effective?

I would dangle money in front of Youtubers, podcasters, and influencers and tell them to cover this subject. I would buy more access to more Op-Eds in newspapers.

This is also a form of advertising, it seems. How does this work? How much does it cost?

The alternative “grass-tops” approach is using the money to hire lobbyists to lobby city and local governments using the moniker of “I’m a problem solver”.

This seems less attractive. Both ideologically and in terms of its potential effectiveness.

For me this is a practical question. If we find a promising way to spend funds, I’d be up to contribute some seed money.

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Anonymous, on November 22, 2024 at 3:30 pm said:

>Are “education” and “public awareness building” forms of advertising or something else?

These can describe various tactics on how marketing / propaganda can be deployed. Education might focus on high school or college students, and focus on the creation of “educational materials” that could be taught by lecturers. This also would focus on lobbying educational institutions to adopt pro-sortition curriculum.

Public awareness focuses on “mass education”. Public awareness building is a typical charitable goal. For example in America, we had a popular “breast cancer awareness” charitable movement.

>How would you evaluate the impact to know that your advertising is effective?

Effective advertising is easy to measure. Do you see donations to the cause increasing? Do you see more signups for volunteer opportunities?

Money is a simple measure of how much people value this movement, and a statement that they’re willing to put in significant work. Volunteering is another possibility yet much more difficult to deploy. Volunteers need to be managed and coordinated, to do what? I’m not sure.

>This is also a form of advertising, it seems. How does this work? How much does it cost?

I’m not a marketing specialist. I imagine a small online American marketing campaign will be on the order of $20,000 USD based on conversations with people in online marketing. And you’ll get what you pay for. A small campaign.

>If we find a promising way to spend funds

The first hire I would make – either this is a volunteer or a professional – is a fundraiser. I would go for the low hanging fruit. I would ask people in pro-sortition spaces (like here) for money. I would ask people to make **yearly contributions** to a pro-sortition fund. This fund would be democratically controlled using sortition. Sortition control over this fund is a crucial validation test for sortition itself. If you can’t trust sortition to manage your money, the idea is already bunk. Put your money where your mouth is. Making the world a better place WILL involve risk.

Perhaps what needs to exist is an INTERNATIONAL fund that can take your money. Democracy Without Elections at the moment is only focused on America, which might or might not interest you.

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Yoram Gat, on November 22, 2024 at 4:01 pm said:

So if the main way to spend money is on advertising then the first thing we have to do is create some advertising materials that we believe we can use and create a plan for the advertising campaign. If a major part of the campaign is to have people sign up for a newsletter or some other communication channel (maybe a YouTube channel?), then we need to decide what this communication channel is going to look like and what content is going to be distributed through it. Only once we have things well planned and well prepared would it make sense to actually start spending money on advertising.

Regarding governance through sortition: I am not sure that for a small organization governance through sortition makes sense. Scale does matter and what’s good for a country is not necessarily good for a small organization with little resources.

As for an international organization: There is an organization called “International Network of Sortition Advocates” (https://www.insa.site/) which may be a starting point for the activities you are proposing.

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johnhuang865, on November 22, 2024 at 5:39 pm said:

>Regarding governance through sortition: I am not sure that for a small organization governance through sortition makes sense. Scale does matter and what’s good for a country is not necessarily good for a small organization with little resources.

In my opinion sortition is already paying some dividends even with smaller organizations.

Have you ever participated in small, direct democratic groups? It is notoriously time consuming to make decisions. Moreover because everyone must participate for democracy, it is extraordinarily inefficient.

Even in small groups, sortition has huge efficiency gains. Imagine a small group of 20 people. Use sortition to cut the decision makers by half, with a 10 person committee. Voila, we’ve just reduced the cost of decision making by 50%!

With volunteer organizations and extremely finite resources, our time is precious.

Finally what is the alternative? The alternative is entrusting a nondemocratic organization to handle your money. The democratic organization is accountable to its members, who can ensure that the organization continues to pursue the interests of its members. The nondemocratic organization is not accountable.

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