And who is in those councils? Elected officials?

No, just more citizens of that community. As an example, imagine instead of different districts of a city just electing some non-recallable representative to make decisions for them in a city council, that instead different neighborhoods got together for meetings to collectively debate on what their part of the city needs, and then once that's decided by consensus, they can then elect a recallable delegate (distinct from a representative) to bring exactly those needs to the wider city council of delegates, who then organize solutions to those problems.

There is a fundamental difference between our current systems of centralized representative democracies and bottom-up federated communities of delegates. The latter is far less effected by corruption, and prevents a top-down government that can dictate to the people without their explicit consent.