What about finding some people who are deeply motivated and have a great understanding of participating fully in civic life? It would also be helpful if these people are excellent communicators and community leaders.

Now, what about a series on PBS or CSPAN or wherever, perhaps kicked off with a talk from the White House or Capitol or Supreme Court?

I can see the series lead off perhaps by Barach Obama, constitutional scholar, community organizer and a heck-of-a communicator. There would be participants from the Judiciary and bipartisan participation from Congress. Also something about participating on the State and local levels. Besides initial (and repeat) airing over PBS/CSPAN/? clips or links would available on any number of websites.

Too much of the "participation" in this country is destructive, polarizing debate. In order to enhance constructive participation, I suggest that leaders recruit specialists in Appreciative Inquiry, an organizational practice that seeks to find solutions by identifying positive, life-giving forces. This is a particularly useful program in dispute resolution, and has been used successfully in South Africa. Talk to Dr. Tojo Thatchenkery at George Mason University or Dr. David Cooperider at Case-Western.

A National Dialog for Improving Public Citizen Engagement.

Responsible Agencies: The White House together with Departments responsible for primary public issues (e.g., foreign policy, immigration, health system reform, climate change, agriculture subsidies, and the like) and the professionals in group process, dialog and deliberative democracy.

What is to be done: The WH, by bully pulpit and a coordinating network or agency (perhaps new, perhaps not), should support

a) process professionals (the pros of dialog and deliberation) and

b) technical contributions from relevant Government departments

in creating nation-wide, local town meeting programs that:

Feature video and web based policy discussions by leading national analysts and political leaders as background material, and

Engage citizens from diverse social and political backgrounds in constructive, sustained dialog.

Why important: Citizens are intelligent, committed, busy, and also significantly locked in partisan and competing value silos, and/or often overwhelmed by the complexity of the issues and the number of policy alternatives. Citizens have limited skills, patience and time for constructive dialog with neighbors on important national and international issues (even, many would say, on neighborhood and community issues!)

The combination of effective, sustained neighborhood and town meetings throughout the nation with access to the quality and intensity of the best, competitive political analyses as background material can dramatically improve citizen competence in democratic participation.

Success measures: At one level, progress can be measured by an increasing number of established local and town meetings that meet successfully for a third or fourth time.

Another measure can track progress in adding significantly to the number of trained, perhaps certified, process facilitators available for and facilitating town meetings.

A second level measure can focus on the quality of the national dialogsperhaps tracking the increase in attendance and questions at congressional campaign forums, perhaps measuring the quality and quantity of citizen input to Government policy deliberations, and the like.

I may be speaking for a lot of people when I say I'm truly concerned about social networking. Though the whole concept of an Open Government is based upon the ideals of social networking and open source initiatives, we can see by recent history, openness can cause harm and unfortunately threats of retribution. For American youth social identity has become their global identity, this is why the passion to reconnect has intesified. The children are impatient to talk to each other. Civic Participation must adapt to mixed mediums such as art, music,short films, true life stories, and the implementation of websites like Our Courts, by Sandra Day O'Connor to teach the kids faster.

Our multi platform civic training can reach the kids and be fascinating without being offensive. Sandra O'Connor could ramp up her idea and break it into parts and make it one of those games the kids play on social networking sites, like Mafia Wars. The kids adapt quickly to pictures and buttons. The White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation may want to consider establishing a competitive grant program for non-governmental artists to work with former justices (and local, state and federal agencies) to innovate new ways to teach kids to engage while setting standards among their friends.

(there is no spellcheck, so sorry if i misspelled).