You are quite right Lamar, people can do a great deal for themselves by remaining motivated and focused on doing constructive things. Communicating with other people helps to sustain your own motivation and provides a means for other people to also feel connected and engaged in a useful way.

I'm a strong advocate of open discussion. Your own ideas are developed best when you try to tell other people what you are thinking. In the process you clarify our own thought processes. If other people take up your ideas, both when they support you and when they challenge you. you get a chance to re-evaluate what you said. Over time this is a very productive and educational process. I've engaged with many online forums, email lists, Ryze forums, and I'm a founding member of "Canterbury Issues" a local area discussion group.

Local Forums - E-Democracy
In a depression every city or district should try to develop it's own local issues forum. Thanks to the work of E-Democracy.Org, this idea is well tested and there are good tools and a sound record of experience to build on. So all it needs is for 2-3 people in your city to agree that this is a task worth doing. Here is a very informative document written by Dan Randow, based on the experience of forming the Canterbury Issues Forum. You can also look at the work of Steven Clift who's been building E-Democracy since 1994 in the USA.

Private Reply to John Stephen Veitch (new win)