Polly is a liquid democracy system with a focus on deliberative policy building and consensus finding.
Representative democracy suffers from obvious problems where power gathers around an elite few, in turn attracting corruption. Historically this has had to be countered by endless manual "checks and balances" which led to the grossly inefficient governments we see before us, while the alternative participatory democratic processes have always been limited in scope because of the overheads of operating them in anything other than a small scale (scaling with square of number of participants).
The difference today is ubiquitous computing and networking, meaning that we can attempt to address the scale limitations that previously prevented large scale participative democracy.