My CURRENT (December 2003) near-ideal Multi Process Program (or community-deliberative pattern, which could repeat, as needed, for different issues) might go something like this in a large town or small city like Eugene:

A quarterly randomly selected citizen Wisdom Council (which has no assigned topic, issue or options, but can come up with them) decides that the most important issue in the community is the new proposed highway construction which would replace twelve residential blocks. They realize they don't have enough information to determine what should happen, but they come up with some guidelines, values, principles, etc.. They then ask that a Citizen Jury or Consensus Conference be convened to evaluate the various options or look for some new approaches.

While the Citizen Jury is being organized (which might take 3-6 months) a number of not too complicated or expensive citizen involvement activities are convened -- an Open Space, several World Cafe, widespread Study Circles or NIF-type discussions. They would all have access to what the Wisdom Council came up with, and to summaries of the various options being bandied about in the public discourse. Results of all these would be well covered by the media (remember, this is an ideal). The idea is to get the community "issue field" (let's call it that) stirred up and potent.

Invite any of the participants of these conversations to participate in a search for new approaches to the problem that aren't currently being discussed or well known. Offer faciltation help to any group, formal or informal, that wants to work on this intensively.

Convene the Citizen Jury (some of whose members may well have participated in these dialogues, or at least heard about them). Have them hear from a number of diverse experts and partisans, including some of the folks who came up with new proposals in the previous paragraph. Have the partisans comment on each other's suggestions, and have the Citizen Jury members cross examine them. The Citizen Jury deliberates - ideally with a Tele Vote audience of several hundred randomly selected viewers watching and giving input - and comes up with its recommendations, which are widely publicized.

If the involved stakeholders don't like the results, convene a Consensus Council, Future Search conference or other STAKEHOLDER dialogue to work through their differences, in the context of what the CITIZENS said they wanted.

If necessary do more dialogues of various kinds. We should note that in the midst of all this, which would be taking about 6-12 months, there would have been one or two more quarterly Wisdom Council, who might well be adding further input into it all. And the papers would be doing their Civic Journalism bit, and the talk radios would be doing their bit, and the websites and listservs would be doing their bit. Etc.

If something compellingly coherent emerged, then the city council would decide according to that recommendation or pay serious political consequences. If nothing coherent emerged and the issue remained a serious battleground, then (as per Jane Mansbridge) the city council would be the tie-breaker and play their embattled majoritarian role so that the issue would get resolved somehow. If they made the "wrong" choice, they'd pay a political price (maybe, depending on how much special interests invested in advertising and fake grassroots groups, etc....

Something like that. On a national scale, or in a large city, America Speaks' Twenty First Century Town Meeting process would be a common part of such a mix, both because there was more money available, and because they have such a power to attract media attention in a noisy media environment.