Demoex

Demoex (from democracy experiment) has a representative in Vallentuna, a suburb of Stockholm. Any local resident over the age of 16 can vote on issues that the council are about to decide and their councilor then re-presents their view. Anyone can get involved in the preceding online debate if they can write in Swedish. Demoex held this seat for more than 8 years, winning three elections, but lost the recent election after amalgamating with other direct democracy advocates to create a national party, Direktdemokraterna.

Denny de la Haye founded a UK branch of Demoex and ran in the 2010 UK General Election. Please see his comments below (thanks, Denny - I've updated this post).

Demoex also have a presence in Brazil.

Lista Partecipata is an Italian initiative using a similar concept as Demoex. Their slogan is "The control of government in the hands of the citizens (and not only at election time)".

Senator On-Line is an Australian political party which proposes to have no platform but rather to act based on online polls.

Digital Democracy UK

Digital Democracy UK is already up and running. Here's their summary:

"Digital Democracy is a campaigning website that does two things:

1) It lets you start and gain support for !Changes.

Register on the website to make a !Change about any issue you have.

Use the tools on the website to gain support from your family, friends and contacts.

2) It helps identify your local community's priorities.

New !Changes are submitted, debated and ranked by popularity alongside others in their area.

!Changes are ranked by the level of support in each local community.

When !Changes reach certain levels of support the !Change is sent to MPs, MEPs, and councillors who are then invited to respond to the issues."

Why Britain should copy Switzerland's referendums

Matthew Lynn has written a piece in MoneyWeek (21/11/14): "Why Britain should copy Switzerland's referendums". Available here.
I'm a fan of the Swiss democratic model. But I'm also a fan of bringing it into the 21st Century by using the internet to make voting cheap and convenient. Interactive Democracy would also facilitate structured debates that could be analysed by voter (age, sex, occupation) and location, allowing voters to aggregate the views of doctors on healthcare issues, for example. Anyone could contribute proposals or initiatives with everyone able to add plus, minus and interesting points and voting if they agree or disagree with each, prioritising and clarifying the issues. Such a system would tap into the creativity and intellect of the population without favour or bias and could, in the future, be considered an important part of our national infrastructure, utilised by many organisations for their own internal issues, as well as at every level of politics.
You can see a mock up of what the ID site could look like by clicking here.

Americans Vote on Initiatives

Alongside the recent Congressional elections Americans also voted on a range of local initiatives including gun controls, marijuana, abortion, minimum pay and healthcare. You can read more about it at NBC, here.

New Power

In this TED talk Jeremy Heimans describes what New Power looks like. Why should you listen to him? Because he's an ex-McKinsey strategy consultant who helped found " GetUp (an Australian political movement with more members than Australia's political parties combined), Avaaz (an online political movement with more than 15 million members) and AllOut (a global movement for LGBT people and their straight friends and family)."
Interactive Democracy could be described as new power, but for it to work to its full potential it needs to become part of the establishment. That's a challenge, as people in power are unlikely to want to give it up. Perhaps the only way to get there is to establish a new political party as was described in the last TED talk I published. Alternatively, members of political parties should be made aware that ID empowers them, too. Sell the idea to them and their leaders will have to accommodate it.