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.