Hi, I'm Anne Strange Champs. It's only a few months into the presidential campaign season,

and I don't know about you, but I'm already sick of it. I mean, somewhere in between the

coverage of Donald Trump's latest outrageous statement and Hillary Clinton's email,

I just lost interest. And I'm not the only one. And the thing is, this stuff is important.

This is about the future of the country.

So how do we make politics, our national politics, into something more than just spectator sports?

Today, on to the best of our knowledge from PRI, we're going to talk about political engagement.

How to make citizenship more vital and more

fun for all of us. Here's one example. You know those notices you get for local public hearings,

water quality, street maintenance, school board? If you're like me, you're not exactly

rearranging your life to attend them. Yes, they matter, but they're just kind of boring.

Josh Lerner thinks local governments could boost the fun factor in the political process

by borrowing ideas from game design. He's watched this happen in places like Venezuela, Canada, and Argentina,

and he writes about it in a book called Making Democracy Fun. Charles Monroe Kane asked where he

went and what he saw. In Argentina, I did research on several local government programs. One of them

was a program called Rosario Appetat, which was designed to redevelop the shanty

towns. So in Argentina, like a lot of Latin American countries, there are extremely poor shanty towns

scattered across the city. So shacks built of scavenged material, of cardboard, of metal planks,

no streets, no safe access to running water, electricity, sewage.

And the city wanted to change this and turn these neighborhoods into actual communities

where people might want to live and which could be more functional and healthy.

So they did this through a program where they asked residents in those shantytowns to decide

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