1 Poll Closing June 11, 2025
Season 8 and 9 Milestone and Metrics Council Selection
Summary: This poll asks OP holders if they support altering the selection process for Milestones and Metrics Council. The new selection process would become use of sortition (randomly choosing) amongst a pool of candidates that must meet one or more of the following criteria:
- Analytics Skills
- Previous M&M Council service
- Completed relevant analytical Foundation Mission
- Reputation in the Collective
- Contributor above wannabe level
- Held a governance role in Season 6 or 7
- Operational Security
- Completed OpSec training by Opsek
Recommendation: Vote Against. As we extensively argued during the governance call where this idea was first introduced, sortition has few successful examples in history, and relies upon an unshakeable belief that the process will be fair and transparent.
Sortition was famously used in Ancient Greece and some of the Northern Italian city-states like Venice and Genoa as a way to combat corruption and nepotism. Notably, even processes with multiple rounds of sortition failed to prevent the sons of previous rules being elected based upon their bloodline and political connections.
Greek and Italian sortition, however, had a major advantage over Optimism: the sortition was simple and performed physically in public (e.g. drawing colored stones out of a jar). In an industry that says to verify everything, the Foundation has not presented a method of sortition that would be transparent to observers, and would effectively be the Foundation stating they performed the random selection in private and then reporting the results.
Sortition, at its core, is about transparency and fairness. There is little reason, based on the information presented in the call and on the forum, that the sortition process for selecting this technocratic role would be transparent – and so it follows, also no guarantee of fairness.
Critically, sortition makes people unaccountable – there is no impact on chances of serving a new term unless a person is so negligent as to be disqualified in the next round – and also is blind to competence. The qualification criteria presented is generally just previous experience in governance, which is confusing because it locks in incumbents from a practical perspective – not a traditional goal of sortition, which is typically trying to remove them.
More broadly, this is part of a long history of experimentation with public choice in Optimism (futarchy, retro funding rounds, bicameralism). In general, these have all been interesting but ultimately wasteful (a large share of retro funding) or not impactful (bicameralism). At this point, we are requesting the Foundation pause conducting political and public choice experiments, so that resources can be focused on value-additive contributions to Optimism and the Superchain.
These are all generally points we raised on the governance call, and have not seen a response that satisfies our questions and criticisms of using random selection to fill a technocratic role.