Dear Ria, I keep track of political developments via http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Politics. In a nutshell, I do not think representation will disappear, but it will be largely extended through both deliberative and direct forms of democracy. We could summarize it as a move from ‘batch processing’ , i.e. the election mode; towards distributed p2p models. One thing is sure, the current form no longer satisfies and has been eroded, and we’re at the dawn of a deep reconstruction. But we can’t just change the institutions, without tackling the social structures that are behind it.