This Policy is to set "Term Limits on Congress". Two terms seperated by two to four years. If you are a member of Congress you can't run for office until you have not been a member for the past two to four years.

An "adversarial relationship" exists between the government and it's citizens. Most federal agencies will accept complaints but do not respond, or the only response is that the agency does not have enough enforcement personnel. Issue an Executive Order, or preferably legislation, requiring government agencies to respond to citizen inquiries and complaints and to take positive action when necessary.

The FBI enforces the civil rights acts but I was informed that due to the lack of agents, they only respond to situations involving death or serious bodily injury. If I am kidnapped, held against my will at the Ritz Carlton and well treated, no local state or federal agency cares. If my local police department discourages complaints by intimidating, or retaliation against, complaints there is nowhere to complain. Police brutality is not punished unless the occasion is video taped and given to the media.

No one in the federal government I have spoken with knows that the Americans With Disabilities Act applies to people with mental disabilities. And few state court judges even know about the ADA and it's provision overriding state immunity laws that permits a victim to sue the judge personally.

Most state and federal laws grant victims a civil right of action against the government or other persons as a consequence of legal violations. It seems that congress is unaware that the cost of a lawsuit is prohibitive for the average person and the vast majority of violations unremedied. A citizen cannot get justice without an expensive adversarial legal encounter. Defendants don't care if the plaintiff is damaged. Their function is to use any means to avoid liability.

The government mantra, "we don't have enough...[resources]" is no excuse for non-enforcement of the law. Where there is no enforcement, there may as well be no law.

The world is not full of hungry lawyers waiting to take any case on a contingency. The fact is that a lawyer will not put out his own money to prosecute a lawsuit unless the chances of winning are very high and the amount of damages huge - such as death or severe personal injury.

Governmental agencies should employ enough personnel to aggressively enforce the laws within their jurisdiction and, where appropriate, to secure financial settlements on behalf of victims who cannot afford to help themselves.

Each governmet agency should have an ombudsman or strongly empowered enforcement division charged with enforcment on behalf of citizens who lack the funds to prosecute a lawsuit. Citizens should be able to submit complaints via e-mail or regular mail if the complaint requires documentation.

This system will be costly but it seems to me that the multitude of well funded private foundations can legally be required to finance this project as a public service. Success can easily be measured by statistics showing the number of compalints lodged, the number of cases closed and the outcomes.

Memorandum of Transparency and Open Government calls for a level of openness in government not seen in the USA before. According to the memo, such an open government needs to be based on transparency, participation, and collaboration.

When democracy arose in Athens in the sixth century BC, all free men participated in gatherings where they freely debated policies that should be pursued by the Athenian government. Today, with technology that makes rapid communication very facile, introducing new tools such as social networking concepts even into government is possible. This facilitates bringing together individuals in an effective, internet-based network groups, seeking to debate and find solutions to important social issues faced by our society. Our governance should be based on such give-and-take discussion among all citizens.

It has been argued that open government is a contradiction in terms you can be open or you can have government. It will indeed be a historic step should the initiative lead to the creation of government of the people, by the people, for the people. So far the initiative looks at best to generate a collection of opinions offered by a small proportion of citizens, opinions to be considered or not by the Executive Departments of the US Government.

Each Citizen must play his/her role!

It will take much more than the current initiative to develop an open-government system that is effective in reaching correct decisions with a very active and comprehensive participation of its citizens.

Provided that the successive elected US Governments will indeed commit to open government principle, an important next steps will involve finding optimal ways

to define problems to be tackled and solved,

to establish an effective mechanism by which discussions are conducted to generate and agree possible solutions, and

ultimately to find ways effectively to implement such solutions to achieve the desired result.

In a democratic system we will need to find ways of implementing our solutions through influencing others both the powers to be and the public opinion in general, through publications, direct communications, explaining, educating, convincing, etc.

How far can open government go in this direction? There are constitutional constraints on how we govern the USA. But this shouldnt stop us from raising challenging questions on important issues. It is unlikely that self-regulating social networks would replace the government in the near future but it should be possible to start creating policies by communities of interest comprised of people who are most heavily affected by them.

Ultimately, how well this is going to turn out will depend on how citizens respond to this challenge. Not only will our system of government need to respond to citizens pressure, but our citizens own attitude to openness, honesty, fairness and tolerance will need to evolve and transform right across the board. We need to alter our culture even more

Individuals who would change what's wrong must be able to address the POLICY or ISSUE that is wrong to offer the change they want. This Open Government effort addresses the fact.

To ADDRESS policy or issues, they must be organized in a RESTATEMENT that is relatively easy for ordinary citizens to read and quickly understand.

The ORGANIZATION of the restatement will require a TABLE OF CONTENTS no longer than a single page.

From the top level Table of Contents, the Restatement may require additiona sub-topical Tables.

Finally, individuals must be able to find restated policies or descriptions of issues that are very close to the "what's srong" they want to change..

At this point MIXED INK or a similar (perhaps even simpler) collaborative writing system must allow the INDIVIDUAL to re-write a paragraph (or sentence or word) of the RESTATEMENT to be sent to editors and policy makers for consideration. (In Mixed Ink we amateurs have these professional tasks).

The CHANGE offered should have about a month to penetrate the restatement or NOT. During that month the individual who is attempting change should be informed by the system automatically of who is commenting on it (or the team that is commenting on it).

Where the OFFERED CHANGE is really good but not immediately doable, the participation system should keep the change moving toward eventual positive effect on the RESTATEMENT with the citizen automatically informed of where it is.

The Restatement would NOT be the actual LAW. But it would reflect the law in laymans language. Therefore, the Restatement would be in two colors: black ink sentences reflecting the LAW and red ink sentences reflecting CHAGES in mind the administration intends in order to improve POICY and CONDITIONS that create the ISSUES.