I live on a street that's 1.7 miles long, and many people use it as a corridor to get to other streets. And they love to speed. So about 4 years ago, in chatting with neighbors (we have very friendly neighbors all up and down the street) it became clear that most of us wanted the city to put in what the city calls "speed humps" for "traffic calming". I am an introvert and not very inclined to get into group projects, but I could see no one else was going to take on the task of collecting enough signatures to get the city moving on helping us, so I decided to take it on. That was enough to get some others involved, and we collected enough. The city scheduled us and finally (after about 2 years) they recently did it. I walk a lot, and people from all up and down the street stop in their cars and say how happy they are with the slower traffic. The whole project has really increased the good feeling among a large group of people. You can just feel it. So even though we weren't at odds with each other to start with, working on it together really made us care bout each other more. So I can see how well it might work when people start out on opposing sides of some issue.
I live on a street that's 1.7 miles long, and many people use it as a corridor to get to other streets. And they love to speed. So about 4 years ago, in chatting with neighbors (we have very friendly neighbors all up and down the street) it became clear that most of us wanted the city to put in what the city calls "speed humps" for "traffic calming". I am an introvert and not very inclined to get into group projects, but I could see no one else was going to take on the task of collecting enough signatures to get the city moving on helping us, so I decided to take it on. That was enough to get some others involved, and we collected enough. The city scheduled us and finally (after about 2 years) they recently did it. I walk a lot, and people from all up and down the street stop in their cars and say how happy they are with the slower traffic. The whole project has really increased the good feeling among a large group of people. You can just feel it. So even though we weren't at odds with each other to start with, working on it together really made us care bout each other more. So I can see how well it might work when people start out on opposing sides of some issue.