A "Canberra Alliance" of more than 40 groups, including churches, environmental activists and unions, is expected to be formed to ensure grassroots voices are heard on community and national issues.
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The impetus for the new body, which will focus on accountability, sprung from the first round of "kitchen table conversations" involving more than 100 people discussing issues they believed were not being given enough priority by the territory and federal governments.
In a sign of growing acceptance of this experiment in participatory democracy, the report of the discussions will be launched on Tuesday by ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell.
The report contains a huge wishlist for changes, with many participants calling for governments to listen more to people and to have long-term goals.
Some people in the 24 groups want the Gungahlin to Civic tram line to proceed, while others are calling for the project to be deferred for two years.
One of the organisers, Professor Bob Douglas, from the Australian National University, said Canberra people responded enthusiastically when given a blank canvas to sketch their hopes for a better future.
"This is not a consensus document. This is a list of concerns that arose and we are not pretending that this is a log of claims," he said.
"The tramline came up again and again. It seems to me there is clearly a split in the community over the tramline at the moment.
"A Canberra Alliance could be very useful to take this debate out of the correspondence columns of The Canberra Times and the angry expressions that come from small groups, to some kind of reasoned debate between a large number of concerned people and the decision-makers."
If the alliance was formed, it would be a "mechanism of accountability", Professor Douglas said.
"It's a gleam in a lot of people's eye, stimulated by the effectiveness of the Sydney Alliance and the developing Queensland Alliance, in getting diverse groups together to think about public interest and public good matters," he said.
"And then, to not just think about them, but to use the product of people in the community to bring some accountability pressures on decision-makers.
"I think ideally it would be a loose confederation of maybe 40 or 50 groups in Canberra, including faith groups, environmental groups, groups like March Australia and Fair Go for Canberra and the union movement."
Many of the propositions in the report call for an almost utopian world.
"Yes, I think most people's aspirations are for something that may be too perfect, but it seems to me what people are expressing is a frustration and a disempowerment, which I don't think was as prevalent when I was young," Professor Douglas said.
"Maybe I'm wrong, but I think there is a flavour of frustration at the moment about the pollies. What's their vision? There is plenty of vision in the community."
Susan Helyar, director of the ACT Council of Social Service, said her organisation was involved in the first public meetings about running the kitchen table conversation project.
"We funded publication of the report from this process because we think it's really valuable to get these different ways of bringing the community's voice into the public debate and political decision-making," she said.
"People want the decision-makers to have a long-term view of issues. We need that long-term view to drive decisions, not short-term fixes.
"The other thing that comes out of the report is how interested people were in actually coming together to have conversations.
"We think that people are politically disengaged. We think people are cynical, but through this very simple mechanism, lots of people came together and were happy to have a conversation about their values and their politics."
