Brett Hennig co-founded and is a director of the Sortition Foundation, which helped run the Global Assembly and campaigns to institute the use of democratic lotteries (also called sortition) in government.
Before co-founding the Sortition Foundation, Brett wore a variety of hats: as a taxi driver, a software engineer, a social justice activist, a mathematics tutor, and the primary carer of four boys. He finished his PhD in astrophysics just before his first son arrived.
After spending several disheartening years in civil society organisations and politics, Hennig became inspired by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's trilogy on political philosophy and began investigating and researching network forms of democracy. The resulting book, The End of Politicians: Time for a Real Democracy, has been called "a book for visionaries" by New Internationalist contributing editor Jamie Kelsey-Fry and was described as "a powerful critique and provocative alternative" by the late Professor Erik Olin Wright.
Hennig has given many talks promoting sortition, has contributed a chapter, "Who needs elections? Accountability, Equality, and Legitimacy under Sortition" to the book Legislature by Lot: Transformative Designs for Deliberative Governance (Verso, 2019) and co-authored the article in Nature, Fair algorithms for selecting citizens’ assemblies.
