My goals and reasons for doing this are the same as those on the www.powerup.org.au homepage. They have said it better than I can. My plan is to implement a Direct Democracy system in my local Council. I chose the council to try this because it's impact would be confined to a geographically and influentially small sphere if something were to go wrong. The smaller catchment area of local government would make the process easier logistically. Council elections do not have mandatory voting, which means I would have less competition for the votes if required to win an election. Also, it would provide a template for others to start quickly once it is proven. For this to work I would need to be voted in as councillor or have the cooperation of a councillor. I must stress that I am not trying to take over local government, replace it or anything like that. This is to prove that it works and show that we as citizens can make the right choices. The DD part runs on a forum, which is free. I have endeavoured to cut out what I think are useless parts of the forum to leave the bare minimum of functionality required to implement DD. Namely, a bunch of categories (not many, keeping it simple) and voting on polls. I'll either stick it up on the web (leaves it open to hacking, but is readily available to many people) or set it up in a shopping centre type place (not connected to the internet so far safer from hacking but requires more effort to get to). I haven't decided yet. Perhaps there is a middle ground I've missed. As I understand it, the items of business for council meetings are released about a month before the actual meeting. I will use this time to set up polls and provide relevant information on the forum so participants can vote for what they want. There will also be an area for discussion. Discussion is kept separate from polls. Participants could use the discussion area to bring up subjects for me to address (as a councillor). It is probable that the discussion area will be user moderated (users can create their own forums). From the little I have seen of council meetings the councillors are given recommendations from various committees. The recommendations would be posted with the relevant poll. Voting options would be yes or no. If a person does not vote on a particular issue, there vote would count as a vote for the recommendation. There may be other types of issues which are not so clear cut, which brings me to my next point. The reason I made the forum was to prove to myself that I could set up a webserver and forum. However, most of what I have come up with for the forum's processes is based on speculation. The next step for me was to research exactly how local government runs so that I can tailor the DD system to it. I figured the best way to do this would be to talk to a councillor. So I emailed my local 12 asking them if they knew about DD and if so, what were their views on it? So far the replies are mixed. One didn't know what it was, but when I told him he was opposed to it. Another knew of DD, but didn't understand the second question. It will be interesting to see what the other councillors and CEO think. I'll keep you posted.