The internet solves many problems, including:
Location – Anywhere there is an internet connection. You don’t have to travel across the country or even across town.
Time – Asynchronous time, whenever the participant has the time. You don’t have to take off work or sacrifice your weekend down time.
Moderation – Participant flag systems can deprecate and automatically censor all uncivil, illogical and disruptive trolls. It’s easier to moderate a few flagged contributions, instead of everything everyone said in every contribution.
Facilitation – Software is made for duplicating complicated workflows. All of the problems associated with live meetings disappear, so the amount of programming needed to produce a cyber facilitator would be greatly diminished. Occasional conference calls would still need live facilitators, of course.
Voting – Reliable and cheap online identification systems already exist.

The challenge I see is in bringing online a wide variety of collaborative problem solving systems for government, business, and civilian use that can enable the masses to reach the best of all possible solutions, with the ability to create and implement plans that can efficiently and effectively bringing their well thought out goals to fruition.