I am Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. I am a member of the EconCS Group; I am also affiliated with the Center for Research on Computation and Society and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. Before joining Harvard in 2020, I had been a faculty member in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

AG 1, INET, AG 5, RG1, SWS, AG 2, AG 4, D6, AG 3   Info

MPI Audience

English

60 Minutes

Saarbrücken

Sortition is a storied paradigm of democracy built on the idea of choosing representatives through lotteries instead of elections. In recent years this idea has found renewed popularity in the form of citizens’ assemblies, which bring together randomly selected people from all walks of life to discuss key questions and deliver policy recommendations. A principled approach to sortition, however, must resolve the tension between two competing requirements: that the demographic composition of citizens’ assemblies reflect the general population and that every person be given a fair chance (literally) to participate. I will describe our work on designing, analyzing and implementing randomized participant selection algorithms that balance these two requirements. I will also discuss practical challenges in sortition based on experience with the adoption and deployment of our open-source system, Panelot.

Kurt Mehlhorn

+49 681 9325 1000