The internet is a great tool for political discourse. Also, it has developed to be continually more democratic and open (think wikipedia and firefox). Considering these two things, I see potential for democracy 2.0.
Consider a political system where every bill is proposed by the people, written by the people, and voted on by the people. A completely direct democracy. I see tremendous potential for this with the information technology we have today. Of course implementing it would be a beast.
More below the fold.
Logistically, I imagine a system that begins with anyone being able to write a bill, which then is then voted on by some number of people and if it reaches a certain percentage threshold, it moves on (analogous to moving out of committee). After that, it could be up for consideration for a certain number of days (30?). During this time people could propose amendments (following a similar process to the bill itself) and discuss/advocate for it. At the end of the discussion phase, it would then be held to a vote, say 3 days for people to vote. Done, bill becomes law.
Now not everyone is able to spend as much time in front of a computer, so perhaps a proxy system would be reasonable. Consider person "A", "B", and "C". "A" doesn't have the time to vote, so she/he gives his/her vote to another voter they trust, "B." But if "B" is running short on time for an upcoming vote, he/she could pass on both "A" and "B"'s votes to "C" temporarily. This seems a lot like representative democracy, and it is. The one big exception being that people can take their own vote back or pass it on to someone else at any time, instead of having to wait until the next election.
Another great potential I see in this is that the number of issues that could be considered simultaneously is practically boundless. While right now congress has a limited number of people who can only do so much in a day. I'm sure that there are more than 535 Americans who would be willing to dedicate large amounts of time into tackling issues and making this country better.
Of course there are A LOT of problems. Voter identity could be stolen. Many people don't have access to a personal computer. Older people might have a harder time understanding the system (for once a republican-leaning group might get disenfranchised). And just imagine the disaster of a system crash.
But still, it seems like it might be worthy of a long term goal. Perhaps a local government somewhere in the world could adopt and develop this system sometime in the next 50 years, try it on for size.