CONCEPT
Minipublics
Small, demographically representative bodies of randomly selected citizens deliberating on specific governance questions — Fung's preferred institutional form for accessing the considered judgment of affected populations at scale.
Minipublics are participatory institutions combining random selection (sortition) with structured deliberation to produce informed, considered public judgment on complex questions. The format has been tested extensively across Ireland, France, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, demonstrating that non-specialist citizens given balanced information and structured deliberative opportunities can engage meaningfully with technically complex questions. Irish citizens' assemblies produced constitutional amendments on abortion and same-sex marriage that conventional political processes had failed to resolve for decades. The French Citizens' Convention on Climate Change produced 149 policy recommendations, most of which the government partially implemented. Minipublics are Fung's preferred institutional mechanism for AI governance because they are structurally resilient to the algorithmic degradation compromising other democratic forms.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The minipublic format addresses limitations of both representative democracy and direct democracy. Representative mechanisms suffer from principal-agent problems and party-system distortions that can produce outcomes diverging from considered public preference. Direct mechanisms like referenda suffer from the absence of deliberation, producing outcomes shaped by campaign dynamics