Certain community members are bringing up good points around the difficulty of productively participating in governance if someone is not a councilor - I'd like to start a thread to keep track of ideas that would alleviate this situation.

here are some seed ideas:

• Add a "proposal queue" to council (like in Democracy) to give the general community broader communication lines to the council - this could involve a higher minimum deposit than democracy and will probably not be automatically promoted to a motion without a council member adopting a proposal - alternatively, a method for allowing Councilors to adopt existing democracy proposals as motions could serve the same purpose.

• ensure Councilors are active and responsive to the community by punishing long-term absenteeism - the details of how to do this without skewing votes is unknown.

• increase the size of council membership - this would likely require some punishment for absenteeism in conjunction as we probably don't want the council to lose it's velocity on Kusama.

• reduce the period of time required to turn a proposal into a Referendum in democracy - or otherwise add a mechanism to accelerate proposals from within democracy

• replace voting in democracy with a prediction market or TCR to add positive incentives (at least at the proposal stage) for participants.

I do not endorse any of the above ideas, I just want to see what discussion can be had around them.