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The federal government should actually open a public forum for people to just talk. It would be interesting and cheap as experiments go.

There are no true public forums anywhere on the web that I'm aware of.

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If you're not already aware, I'd recommend checking out deliberative democracy. Some of its advocates are pushing for something like this, but in a structured, moderated form. There's obviously debate over what the structure and moderation should look like and plenty of debate between deliberative democracy proponents and related schools of thought, but the general thrust (my words, I'm not speaking for anyone else, so I might not do them justice) is that the process of discussion and deliberation is as fundamental to democracy as the process of voting, and should be accommodated by the government just like voting is.

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