Currently the best educated and the brightest minds of any nation are not among its elected, but among its public, and in much greater numbers.
But even having a great number of the best and the brightest amongst us does not make us capable of installing a working version of direct democracy right away.
People who claim that it does, may be there to voluntarily or involuntarily damage the credibility of direct democracy.

Direct democracy needs a yet inexistent infrastructure to support the new mechanism that will render the public capable of constituting the experience necessary to domesticate direct democracy, without destabilizing our societies with needless haste, emotions and fractures.
One way of doing it may be the constitution of a nation-wide, internet reliant hence fluid, non-political organism parallel but totally hermetic to our representative democracies, with a unique objective: creating the means, platforms and protocols necessary for the public and all the specialists it contains, to communicate horizontally.

The public may decide to keep for the moment our representative democracies, but in parallel create an experimental version of direct democracy until we all acquire the necessary perspective and invent new working mechanisms of self-governance. Later the public may decide to have both representative and direct democracies sharing governance for a time, and experience first-hand the advantages and disadvantages of both systems before deciding where to go from there.

Haroutioun Bochnakian