Let's take a small municipality and play.

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