We know a few things don't work, at least.
- Contests don't really work. That has been established exhaustively with graphic design contests, art contests, poetry contests, etc.
There's just very little prestige involved with something like that, and trying to tack on extra prestige doesn't really work since it ends up seeming cheap and inauthentic. - Offering low-level positions doesn't really work. The modern civil service has been around for a very long time now, ever since Owen Edwards and I agreed on a compromise to put it in place, and I think exactly zero people have been motivated to do stuff. Some folks have served, but they all seem like they would have been just as happy to do so as a deputy or whatever.
- The new citizens' page on the wiki (and I guess there's a packet somewhere?) has worked somewhat, since it has pointed people to some common next steps like claiming arms, and they have advanced through them. But there's not a lot of stuff for anyone to do, so there's only so much orienting that will help.
I think if the Zuavs got some real buy-in, it's a model that can work. No criticism on anyone, but it needs to be the real focus of a Government with support and energy from the Cabinet if it's going to be sustainable. The same energy that made the wiki-work-for-PD program effective would work here, but could scale up even more, since it could be goofy fun, but also actually productive competition. In a couple of months of the start of the efforts, we saw actual things being produced -- Epic wrote a whole academic paper for it! -- and that could happen again with the organizing energies of more than one person at work and the imprimatur of the Government.
Instead, we are once again all mostly talking about big constitutional changes, like we do every year, and that's where most of the effort and time will go. And because these arguments are so bitter, with deeply personal attacks and often outright insults, they poison the well of future cooperation on the real priorities.
As so often, we see a macro-world problem in our country. It's a coordination problem -- the prisoner's dilemma. It's in the interest of each party to focus overwhelmingly on their topline big constitutional issue, since that excites their partisans more than workmanlike effort on new citizen engagement. But an even better outcome would be for everyone to agree on focusing on new citizen engagement. Unfortunately, there's no mechanism by which the parties can coordinate, so they must voluntarily agree and trust each other not to defect. We see the same dynamic in macro-world politics all the time.
