If there is one underlying theme for my blog, and perhaps for much of my life right now, it is encouraging civic involvement. Kim works for Common Cause, trying to bring about better government through more civic involvement, and that is what is so important about public financing of elections, to me. It is not so much about getting the corrupt money out of government as it is getting more citizens involved in the electoral process.

Now, a little over a week before the inauguration of our next President, there are lots of people trying to find ways to keep those who became so involved in the election involved in our civic life together.

The transition team has set up change.gov to promote civic involvement. The Presidential Inauguration Committee has their website up, including a section to create service events. I wrote about this a little bit earlier and have been getting great feedback. Please, find an event, or set one up yourself.

Change.Org is having a contest for the best ideas on how to change America. This, in and of itself is a great way to get people thinking and talking about changes they can make. Larry Lessig has a great blog post about why Citizens’ Funding of the Nations Elections should be one of the top choices. Please, watch the video, and cast your vote.

Others are also joining in the fight for clean government. Ben and Jerry’s is selling “Yes, Pecan!” ice cream during the month of January, and proceeds will go to Common Cause. They are also donating to Common Cause for people joining Common Cause on Facebook.

Beyond this, there are all kinds of interesting new tools becoming available to promote civic involvement. Ask Your Lawmaker has a new widget available. The widget lets “users ask and rank questions and hear the latest answers from Capitol Hill”.

MixedInk has now officially launched. They are a site where you can collaboratively write articles, Op-Eds, or just about anything you can imagine. Together, with Slate, they are asking people to help write a People's Inaugural Address, a fascinating idea on how to promote civic involvement.

MoveOn is hosting various Congressional Action Trainings across the country to help regular people become more effective citizen lobbyists. This is at the national level. On the State level, this raises some interesting questions that the State Elections Enforcement Commission is trying to grapple with. My wife Kim is a registered lobbyist. At the beginning of each year, she needs to go to the Office of State Ethics to get a lobbyist’s badge. It costs $150, and there are all kinds of filing requirements. This is for paid lobbyists. Yet each one of us, if we were more involved are lobbyists in our own ways. If a group like MoveOn got thousands of volunteers to much more actively lobby the State Legislators, what are the issues that the SEEC and the Ethics Office must face?

Pushing this a little bit further, we’re trying to work out a trip for Fiona’s class to go up to Hartford to learn how the legislature really works. Essentially, they will be student lobbyists for the day. How do we get more students civically involved? What are the issues?

Here, we get down to the local level. One of the things I would love to see is more people attending Board of Education meetings, Board of Selectmen meetings, City Council meetings, and so on, and then writing about it online. It used to be that the local papers did that, but the newspaper industry is having enough difficulties now that perhaps, just as we have volunteer fire departments in smaller towns, we need volunteer journalist departments. Be a volunteer journalist in your town!

It is this drive to promote civic involvement that has led me to many of my blog posts about technology education in our schools. Every school district in Connecticut should be working out their three-year technology plan right now. However, I find almost nothing about such plans online, and the plans that I do see often have very sparse representation of the community as a whole.

Here in Woodbridge, we are fortunate that the papers are surviving very well. The Amity Observer had an interesting article this week about a request for a guardrail on a local road. The town of Seymour has dragged its feet and this may end up in court.

What I found most interesting about the article, however, was that Seymour’s First Selectman “Koskelowski said he has never received a request from anyone other than the Rumbolds to put up a guardrail, but he said he understands their motivation.”

This too, is about civic involvement on the local level. I sent an email to First Selectman Koskelowski asking, “How many requests do you typically require before you put up a guardrail where there has been a fatal car accident? How many requests do you typically receive safety improvements in Seymour?“

I continued by saying, “I'm interested in any thoughts you might have on how to improve civic involvement on the local level and help First Selectman's offices around the state become more responsive to the requests of its residents.”

As of the posting of this blog entry, I have not received a response from First Selectman Koskelowski.

So, what do you think? What are your ideas for promoting civic involvement?

Update:
My regular readers will know that I like to promote Twitter as a tool to encourage civic engagement. Kim is starting to use Twitter more and one of her tweets earlier today highlights using Twitter to promote civic engagement. It is also an important notice:

Appropriations meetings are public, anyone interested in attending to support Clean Elections, please come on Mon. 11 AM, LOB, Htfd.