Democracy as we know it has run its course - It is time to modernize our Government

[ArnoldRimmer]

I realize this is an old thread anyway, but since I missed it back then and the2real4mafol just replied anyway, I want to post my opinion as well.

I agree on the first part about more direct democracy. Actually, I find it quite ridiculous that it's often people who praise "democracy" who are also often the most outspoken critics of more/direct democracy.
Isn't that ironic? Several scientific studies have been released in recent years which have come to the conclusion that when looking at the facts, modern political systems like the american democracy are actually not democracies, but oligarchies.

Believing at the same time that citizens are in general not politically mature enough to directly vote on policies, yet at the same time believing that they are politically mature enough to vote on representatives (and believing that it is very important that they do) is quite ridiculous.

People with this mindset may consider themselves to be very democratic, but I think that they are actually not democratic at all.

I tend to differ on the second part though. I agree that it might make sense to step away from the "one man, one vote"-thinking, but I would personally suggest a different approach:
In a truly directly democratic system, I would personally suggest that everyone can still vote, but that people's votes will have different weights.
But not in the sense of "Citizen A's vote always has weight 7.5, citizens B's vote always has weight 3.75". This would be a naive approach that which suggests that Citizen A's opinion is always more valuable than Citizen B's.
Instead, every citizen should have multiple weights; for example, Citizen B. might be very skillful when it comes to economics, while citizen A. may have very little knowledge about economics. On the other hand, Citizen A. may be very skillful when it comes to foreign policy, which Citizen B. might suck at.

So it would for example make sense that Citizen A. vote has a higher weight than Citizen B. when it comes to questions of foreign policy, and vice versa when it comes to questions of economics.

I believe that this would be the best approach - the only problem is: by which algorithm should these weights be computed? It should be a transparent, trustworthy, comprehensible automatic algorithm.