What's going wrong with our politics - and how can we fix it?
Futures Forum: The government's "civil society strategy" will not give people "a more direct role in decision making." > Rather, we need a real dose of 'deliberative' or 'participatory' democracy.

There are radical fixes:
Futures Forum: Barcelona’s Experiment in Radical Democracy
Futures Forum: Experimentation in Catalonia

And we very much need to consider radical fixes in the current situation:
Futures Forum: Brexit: and the case for more horizontal, collaborative and diverse networks
Futures Forum: Brexit: and how the Irish referendum's "deliberative democracy" countered fake facts

Which might involve 'ordinary people':
Futures Forum: Other ways of doing politics >>> "New experiments in democracy around the world are trying to take politics back to ordinary people"

From the Jacobin earlier in the year:

Beyond Electoral Democracy

BY TOM MALLESON

The radical democracy of the future requires more than just elections.
We need a legislature by lot.

Recent years have witnessed a remarkable explosion of interest in the use of random selection to solve political problems. A number of social movements have advocated random selection, such as the 15-M movement in Spain, Syntagma square in Greece, Nuit debout in France, and the G1000 in Belgium. Progressive parties like Podemos have begun introducing random selection into their internal procedures. Perhaps most importantly, random selection has started to appear in formal political settings, such as the Citizens’ Initiative Review in Oregon, the Icelandic constitutional reform, the Citizens’ Assemblies in Canada, and the Irish Constitutional Convention, which resulted in the legalization of gay marriage.

We now have a wealth of practical knowledge about the efficacy of random selection, spanning more than three decades, from the pioneering work of Ned Crosby’s Citizens Juries to Lyn Carson’s new Democracy Foundation to Jim Fishkin’s Deliberative Polling. While the details vary, the experiments all point to the real potential for regular people to deliberate well and arrive at reasoned judgements.

Beyond Electoral Democracy - Jacobin

And from Radio 4 earlier today:

Thought Cages

A Parliament by Lottery

Could we fix the disconnect between the public and its politicians – by selecting our MPs by lottery?
In today’s episode, ad guru and expert on human behaviour Rory Sutherland explores how a “House Of The People”, comprised of a random cross-section of the British public – might be better at truly reflecting the considered will of the British people.
Rory is joined by the Australian political economist and expert on innovation Nicholas Gruen, - who explains how the idea dates back to the Ancient Greeks – and the MP for Birmingham Yardley, Jess Philips, an elected parliamentarian who’s keener on the idea than you might expect…

Thought Cages - A Parliament by Lottery - BBC Sounds
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