Recent threads have brought to the fore the questions of sense of community and level of activity in the CDS. While these are problems, even serious ones, characterizing them as crises.....
First of all there's the question of activity. The CDS has never been a "happening" place. I can count on my fingers the times I can remember one of our sims being really crowded. The fact that traffic is now near the top of the agenda is a good sign. It means we're politically and financially stable enough to worry about it.
I also whether the traffic problem is one the government can really "solve". We could do event support, but it seems to me that NGO's (MoCA, etc.) have done more on this front than the government can.
Community is a stickier wicket. I do think that physically linking the present sims would help, but that the problem goes deeper than needing to teleport.
Way back when, our raison d'etre was to prove that democratic governance was possible in SL - Check
It was to show that a community could sustain itself through turnover of leadership - Check
Now what?
We've written about being a democratic incubator and "cit(ies) on a hill". The truth is that most SL communities don't need this much government apparatus to function efficiently. It's only worth doing if you have philosophical positions about fairness and the like that compel it. The fact that we are nearly alone on the grid in doing things this way suggests that, for most groups, a sim or sims aren't a big enough deal to go to the trouble of democratizing.
We may also be at the point where government ceases to be the primary actor in our community. Now that we're dealing with problems, like traffic, of which government may not be the best solver.
3 things you mention can be addressed in a practical way:
