Roy,
you raise a lot of valid points (and with many of your positions I can agree), but I am afraid that many people here are often mixing two or more things together.

For example, mixing a far-future goal of true democracy and the concrete little steps to encourage citizen participation that may be doable right now (your challenge to write a small-community constitution apparently deals with what is doable right now, our struggle with the definition of DD is more about the formulation of the long-term ideal, although it was not explicitly mentioned, which should be rectified).
I think it is important to have this long-term goal (irrespective of what are our present guesses whether it can ever be realized in its entirety).
"Shadow parliament" (although I am not particularly fond of that term, because it is often used by media for something quite different - an undemocratic behind-the-scene group that controls the elected politicians) may well be the best concise summary of conditions necessary to achieve the ideal democracy, probable at least the best summary I have seen. Even if these conditions may seem to be unattainable at present, they can provide guidance for the selection of those little practical steps.

I agree with you that we suffer from that most everybody has a tendency to promote their own positions/models/etc. without trying hard enough to make some compromise synthesis of all the proposals. So it is encouraging that you and Fred have been able to arrive at some compromises through discussions. This should be an inspiration for everybody else.

However, you should bear in mind that the constitution that you and Fred will arrive at, will at this stage be only another of already many DD models formulated by others, often by a single authors, but sometimes by a group of people larger than two. It will be just a compromise acceptable to you and Fred. It would be nice if you could repeat the same process that you are trying with Fred in a real community where everybody may participate in the formulation of the constitution. So the largest contribution of yours and Fred's effort may be the summary of your experience how to negotiate compromises.

Mirek

mk, [democracy.mkolar.org]