Bailey Flanigan 

Date/Time: 19.02.2025, 12:00

Location: D2.2.094 

Abstract 

In the past few years, there has been a flurry of computer science research on sortition, the task of randomly sampling a representative subset of people. This work has so far been primarily applied to choose members of citizens' assemblies, but it could in principle apply to a much broader range of democratic models for direct citizen participation in governance. This talk will describe the key challenges of sortition in practice, and then overview some of the algorithmic tools that have been developed to mitigate these challenges. 

Bio 

Bailey Flanigan is an HDSI Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard, hosted by Archon Fung at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Starting Fall of 2025, Bailey will be an assistant professor at MIT joint between political science and computer science. Bailey studies direct democratic participation and political methodology using tools from algorithms, social choice, and statistics.