For a full description of the system described on this page, visit http://www.directrep.org.
Although we try to improve representative democracy, we should always keep our eyes on the prize: real grassroots democracy. What follows is a description of one form that this may take. This is not polished and I know no examples where it's used. I'd have difficulty advocating that, say, Massachusetts should use it right away. However, I think it would be very interesting and useful to use it at, say, a student council, a large cooperative, or the massgreens ourselves, and learn from our experience.
The idea is this: instead of now and again voting for candidates to "represent" you in the legislature, you each have one vote in the legislature. You must delegate this vote to any member of the legislature. If you like Barbara Lee, you can do more than "stand with" her, you can choose her to cast your vote for you. You can transfer your vote to a different member of the legislature every so often. Say, during your birth month.
There would be ongoing "pledge drives" to get people into the legislature, similar to today's signature drives but more meaningful. You become a member of the legislature if, say, one percent of the population has "pledged" to delegate their votes to you. You stay there as long as you have half that many votes delegated to you. You can never have more than 3% of the votes delegated to you. When the legislature casts their votes on bills, each of them doesn't cast one vote, they each cast as many votes as people they represent. (Or perhaps this is rounded to the nearest thousand.)
Instead of having a legislature built around campaigns to defeat opponents, you have a more fluid body, built around anybody who has support from some community. If you delegate your vote to anybody in the legislature, your vote counts on every single bill.
On a campus of 3,000 undergraduates, it might work like this: you need 100 pledges to get elected, 75 to stay elected, and you can't have more than 200 at once. Each Friday, the students in a different dorm could change who their votes are delegated to. If there was a big issue on campus, a campaign might build to get people into the student council for that issue. After the campaign is over, maybe some of the newly elected people would drop out, and somebody else could take over.
This is part of Dan Keshet's Voting Systems website.