I find the model of liquid democracy enticing: Every decision is voted on by the people of the community and because that would be overwhelming you can delegate your vote (in general, for a certain topic or just for a single vote) to someone you trust, like an expert in that area. Maybe people might get a little money for voting so experts who vote with many votes can do this professionally in full time.
So now you have people competing for the expert status for certain topics (like health care or foreign affairs) and everyone in the community can have direct influence on the outcome of every decision. Every bit of power is earned and most decisions are effectively made by trusted experts.
Dunno, elections, maybe? Seems like a common way to get community consensus on personell decisions. For things like public office. So people get to vote for who they think is best suited, who has the most merit. And for lower level positions, you could have entrance exams and a mechanism for promotion that takes into account job performance.
And for the economic sphere, we could let people vote with their wallets...
I'll take town board/administrator form of government, you take "meritocracy."
In my form of government the board members run for office periodically. The ones who get the most votes win. Then they hire a professional bureaucrat to handle the day to day business of keeping a municipality up and running.
Here's what I've got:
* a discrete (and anonymous!) method to determine who will become the board members
* local community members who campaign and are subject to citizens by virtue of elections
* at least one professionally-trained bureaucrat who more likely than not is competent in the job and given the power by the board to make day-to-day decisions like hiring and firing people
So... How does your meritocracy function?
What's the way you measure and get consensus on community leaders' merit?
How are those leaders held accountable?
How do you ensure at least one of those leaders is trained in a relevant field as opposed to being trained only in the art of rhetoric (shout out to Socrates for this question)?
Edit: clarification