From the experience I have acquired in social network conversations and crowdsourced discussions, I noticed that people are ready to give portions of attention, that may add up to significant time and involvement, but it is hard to obtain commitment to deliver something consistent, especially on wide open issues that are somewhat abstract and cannot be transformed into a project with a deadline and action plan. Most of the attempts at long term collective participation fall short because these pieces of attention get diluted or too focused on detail.

The whole difficulty of the exercise is to channel these chunks into meaningful and constructed action that operate on the proper levers and to drive more commitment. That's why constructing the platform around issues as social objects is critical. It enables to create ongoing conversations around and from disparate chunks.

Channeling the conversations can be achieved with collective intelligence tools that can piece together the chunks in meaningful ways and feed back patterns into the discussion to drive practical action, just as well conceived result and evaluation data can show evolution in the making and drive more action. I have illustrated this here in an older blog post: http://menemania.typepad.com/h...

Driving more commitment can be eased by facilitating access to what people really care about and to resources that can help them unfold their discovery and action journey step by step, moment after moment. Here is a diagram where I illustrated this: http://bit.ly/wDMN4t.