Introduction
The idea is, that currently most members of a society in a democratic country do only participate passively in the democratic process (by watching TV discussions or so..). The only active democratic action is the election which takes only place every 4-5 years in such countries.
On the other hand people do comply about their situation and discuss with friends about politics and about problems in the society.
When we take a closer look at those who represent the society in politics we find, that these people are often driven by their desire to win the next upcoming election or to have a better standing in their party. Many politicians are also tightly connected to certain lobbies.
When we combine these basic thoughts we can come to the conclusion that the current democratic parties do not represent the whole society very well and that the society hasn't got much power.
Direct Democracy
Some countries like Switzerland do regular plebiscites to ask their society in several questions. This is indeed a form of democracy where the society has more power than in other countries like Germany.
But even in Switzerland the discussion process about political decisions takes only place in the parties. Which means that solutions which can be elected in a plebiscite are developed by a small fraction of the society.
Crowd Sourcing / Open Source
Collaborative well known IT projects like Linux (open source) or wikipedia (crowd sourcing) show that a lot of people can organize themself to communities to produce solutions which where thought to only be produced by very large companies.
IT based Base Democracy
What if we had a tool which would alow a lot of people to discuss political topics, to pick out problems that are important to the whole society and to elect this problem to be solved. Then solutions would be provided by the community as well and the best solutions would be found in a democratic way again. Than when a bunch of solutions is available elections are started to find the final solution to the problem. In this process the whole community produced and elected a solution.