Allegheny County's 1.27 million residents live in 130 municipalities and come from a range of ethnic, racial and economic backgrounds.

Can elected officials ever get them to consider merging government services?

Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer Date of birth: May 13, 1945 Place of birth: Hampton, Iowa In the news: Lukensmeyer, president of AmericaSpeaks, gave the second annual Lawrence W. Kaplan Lecture in Conflict Resolution Tuesday at the Omni William Penn Hotel. Quote: "If you sit on the public side, it's totally obvious when a politician just uses a crowd as opposed to listens to a crowd." Education: Doctorate in organizational behavior, Case Western Reserve University; bachelor's degree in English and political science, University of Iowa Family: single

Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, president and founder of Washington, D.C.-based AmericaSpeaks, has a suggestion: Put those residents in one room.

Not all of them, of course. But a diverse group of at least several thousand ordinary citizens should be asked to come together to discuss the future of local government in the Pittsburgh region.

"You need to have people present from all 130 jurisdictions," Lukensmeyer said.

Over the past decade, AmericaSpeaks has held 45 high-tech town hall meetings in as many as 30 states, allowing people who are usually disengaged from governmental decision-making to let elected officials know their opinions about education, economic development, the environment and an array of other fundamental public policy issues.

Lukensmeyer discussed the technique, called "deliberative democracy," when she gave the second annual Lawrence W. Kaplan Lecture in Conflict Resolution Tuesday at the Omni William Penn Hotel, Downtown, an event sponsored by the Allegheny County Bar Association, Mediation Council of Western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh Mediation Center.

"We've never really had a process that engages the public," said Ann Begler, chairwoman of the bar association's alternative dispute resolution committee. "I think a lot of people want to know about the work of AmericaSpeaks."

Before entering the nonprofit world, Lukensmeyer, 59, spent 10 years working in both state and federal government, serving as chief of staff for former Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste, and from 1993 to 1994, advising President Bill Clinton's White House on decision-making procedures in the chief of staff's office.

Lukensmeyer, who has a doctorate in organizational behavior from Case Western Reserve University, helped implement ways of streamlining communication among varying government agencies. But she was bothered by how little direct connection there was between elected officials and the citizens they serve.

"If you sit on the public side," she said, "it's totally obvious when a politician just uses a crowd as opposed to listens to a crowd."

Most citizens have a better understanding of public policy issues than many officials realize, and the goal of AmericaSpeaks, Lukensmeyer said, "is to make 'of the people, for the people, by the people' real again."

In July 2002, the organization helped put together one of its largest town hall meetings to date, when 4,000 New Yorkers gathered at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center on the west side of Manhattan to give their views of preliminary plans for rebuilding the World Trade Center.

Developers used data gathered at the meeting for the international competition that eventually selected architect Daniel Libeskind's Freedom Tower design, Lukensmeyer said.

Earlier this year, a collection of philanthropic organizations in northeastern Ohio launched Voices & Choices, an effort to engage thousands of people in the creation of an agenda for revitalizing the regional economy. In November, Lukensmeyer hopes to hold a large-scale town hall meeting in Akron.

Would the AmericaSpeaks model be useful here?

Lukensmeyer thinks so, as long as certain guidelines are followed.

Any eventual town hall meeting has to reflect Allegheny County's demographic and geographic diversity, and educational materials at such an event need to be fair and neutral.

Then participants can sit in small, randomly-selected groups, feeding responses to questions on various issues into a laptop computer. By the end of the session, an overview of those opinions would be shown on large display screens.

Finally, county leaders need to support the process and be willing to apply some of the findings.

"I guarantee to you," Lukensmeyer said, "everyone will learn more about what the public wants and what the public thinks about regional government. There will be some convergence."

That information, she argues, would help officials guide a future process of government mergers and consolidations.