This is not an idea I came up with, but I haven’t seen it anywhere else and I don’t remember where I heard it.
Basically the rules are:
Every vote on every question is handled by direct democracy
But, you can assign your vote to another person at any time. ie Give them your voting power so now they have two votes on any topic
Furthermore, a person to whom you’ve assigned your vote can in turn assign it to someone else.
You can always see who’s wielding your vote power, you can see who assigned it to whom
Any time you want, you can take your vote back
So basically I can assign my vote to Bob because I trust his judgment. Bob can assign mine and his own to Alice, because Bob trust’s Alice’s judgment.
I can check what’s happening with my vote, and see that it’s been assigned to Bob, who assigned it to Alice, etc.
There is no limit to the number of reassignments that can happen.
Basically it’s direct democracy by default, but with an infinitely and dynamically scaleable structure of delegation layers in between.
A person can be as involved or uninvolved as they want. Their minimum involvement would be choosing which friend they trust to handle their vote. Maximum involvement could mean seeking to convince millions of others to trust you with their vote. Or getting thousands of intermediate delegates to delegate all their voting power to you.