There’s a saying in politics that goes something like -- politicians are the worst because the sorts of people who want the job are exactly the ones you don’t want winning. Modern politics requires politicians to be very good at fundraising and attention-gathering as their primary skill-set -- which very rarely translates into good governance or operational competence.

DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) are often touted as an opportunity for people to “do democracy better”, but the existing governance models we see now may have too many similarities with real-life politics for it to get the sort of radical change that people want. When something is new and uncertain, the tendency is to simply recreate what we already know and are familiar with -- and we see that most of the DAOs that have popped up in recent years end up bearing striking resemblances to models that have already existed prior.

ENS (Ethereum Name Service), arguably the DAO with the biggest visibility in the crypto space right now, experimented with the idea of turning tokens into votes -- basically allowing people to buy and sell votes as if they were shares in a company. Sound familiar? This is basically a recreation of the shareholder model that many companies use, where the token-issuers retain their control over the system by controlling the supply of publicly available shares. Can this model be made to work? Sure. Is it a significant departure from what already exists? No - and I think it’ll be much healthy for the ecosystem to acknowledge that the novelty of simply replacing shares with tokens doesn’t necessarily mean that anything new was actually done.

If the ENS platform were scrutinized under typical public election laws, some of the transactions that happen on that platform right now (giving out freebies and favors in exchange for votes) could potentially be considered a felony since most election rules prohibit people from campaigning this way. The defense against that criticism is that you could argue that ENS is not a public entity, therefore those sorts of rules don’t apply -- people on there should be allowed to buy and sell votes however they want. (At least it’s transparent, isn’t it?) But at that point, it undermines the notion that ENS could ever be more than a platform where corporate structures and moneyed interests reigns supreme. It’s a huge buzz-kill to the dream of a decentralized Web3, either way.

The other way DAOs are typically organized is through public election models, where 1 wallet = 1 vote, which is thought of as the “fairest” way to run a democracy. (Most developed nations run in this model in one way or another -- 1 citizen, 1 vote.) In Web3, however, this runs into the problem of voter identification and standards, since crypto wallets right now aren’t really beholden to government-ID systems like IRL elections are.

KYC (Know Your Customer) systems have issues with being reliant on government IDs, while the attempts at creating “government-less” ID systems online haven’t been proven secure enough to be considered reliable, just yet. (Personally I’m skeptical if this can really be achieved even with the blockchain, but am open to being proven wrong.) One person could create multiple wallets, loophole the standards system, take advantage of geographic disparities, etc. -- most DAOs right now are running on the honor system (which can work if the community is small enough) but will be in big trouble should the stakes get higher.

DAOs are still in its experimentation phase so it still has plenty of time to revise and remodel its approaches as it attempts to tackle the eternal problem of political governance. But my concern is that the governance models of Web 3 is starting to look a lot like what already exists IRL, and we’re simply recreating the problems from there and making it digital without even realizing it. We have an opportunity to rethink the way we organize society from the ground up -- shouldn’t we be taking full advantage of this one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something different rather than falling back into old, bad habits? That’s where the concept of Sortition comes in.

Democracy By Lottery - The Sortition Model

Going back to the first question of “how do we get people who don’t want be politicians, to be politicians?”, the answer is actually pretty simple -- you take unsuspecting citizens off the street and force them to do their civic duty. (Or face the possibility of penalties and/or jail time.) Whom would you choose to be the president of your community -- the everyday citizen who was picked at random, or the “ambitious” self-obsessed narcissist who dreams every day about how to maximize their power and influence over as many people as possible? If given a choice, I think that most reasonable people would choose the former. And having the person at the top be a little afraid of the people that they represent isn’t necessarily a bad thing, I would also argue. (Especially since when the situation is reversed, that’s when corruption starts running rampant.)

The example above might be considered extreme, but we already do this in the real world already in the form of jury duty. Keyword being duty, since it’s not supposed to be something you do for fun or a way to work the ladder for personal gain -- it’s supposed to be a job you do in order to keep your community safe and secure. And lottery systems are used by government entities all the time (especially in situations when the state doesn’t have enough of something to give out universally), since it’s a way -- arguably the only way -- to eliminate personal bias and agendas from the selection process as a whole.

To the ETH team’s credit, they are aware of this approach, at least some what -- Vitalik Buterin talks about the role random sampling will have on the selection process for ETH2’s consensus and sharding mechanism to come in the near future so this should be of some comfort to those worried about the fairness of the next few updates to come. Logically speaking, leaving the selection process to a dice-roll is the fairest way to choose things, after all -- the time to worry is when leaders start taking the “I Know Best” attitude towards its users, which is a holdover of Web2 thinking and should be considered to be a red flag for any serious Web3 supporters out there.

A Practical Sortition Model for Web 3

The examples used in the previous section was exaggerated on purpose just to make a point (I don’t actually think creating punitive measures for non-participation is a good idea, for the record) -- but there is a practical way to utilize some of these ideas in DAOs (even in its current form) that could potentially be employed right now.

The practical benefits of using a sortition model to run governance DAOs:

• When delegates are chosen at random, it eliminates the need for campaigning and political advertisements completely.
• Can be run in a perpetual way (more details on this below), eliminating the need for election seasons or dates as a whole.
• Disconnects electoral outcomes from moneyed interests, media hype, and opportunism, in general.
• Solves the KYC problem in a very real way -- requires no government IDs, while minimizing the damage done by bad actors since they’re likely to get outvoted by the other representatives at every vote.
• It’s one of the rare situations where the government is proactive in getting everyday citizens involved, rather than doing things behinds closed doors. It’s also makes much more efficient use of community funds, since most electoral outcomes will run on its own without the need for gatekeepers or administrative roles.

Using some of these ideas, one possible model might be:

• The sortition algorithm chooses wallets that have higher than a 0 balance (the assumption that non-0 = active) at random from the pool of existing users -- the user is given a notification whether or not they want to accept the role of being a delegate.
• The “offer” to take the role runs on a timer, so the user has a limited time frame whether or not they want to accept. If they decline, ignore, or fail to respond in time, the contract will close and the offer will be given to the next wallet in queue. (Wallets that are abandoned or lost will simply time out.)
• If the offer times out without a response, it’s assumed that the wallet is abandoned and collects a small fee at the close the contract. If the amount in the balance is less than the fee, it will reset the wallet to 0. (As an added bonus, this is a way for the community to collect “lost” funds and clean up their wallet structures over time as well.)
• From the delegate classes and upward, the model turns into a voting model, where roles (President, Vice President, Treasurer, etc.) are created and voted on. This operates more like the normal DAOs we see now -- the most important thing is that the fundamental layer runs on random sampling so that the intensions of the community never gets disconnected from the top.
• Delegates delegate for a fixed time period (e.g. 1-year, 2-years, etc.) then lose their ability to vote at the end of their term. This happens on an on-going basis, so each delegate will have their own start and end date. Voting will be done as representatives come in an out. There are no election dates; no election seasons -- the system just runs on its own autonomously, perpetually.

This is one possible vision of a sortition-based DAO that could be tried, but there are a million different ways these things could be organized -- and I hope that the Web3 folks out there will take the opportunity we have now to try something more radical, and potentially groundbreaking. I’m already seeing disappointed looks from the existing DAOs that are being attempted now, but a lot of that comes from people recreating the same problems of the past by doing things we already know doesn’t work -- what’s there to lose? Why not try something new?