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A good cause that I would like LW to talk about more is "competitive government", including Patri Friedman's seasteading project and Paul Romer's efforts to establish charter cities.
It would rock really hard to create new states to which people could move and in which people could put down roots that were better than the current options although of course there are very formidable barriers to doing that.
The art of creating and maintaining effective online communities has significant overlap with the art of government and at the current time is probably the best place to advance the art of government because the cost of trying new things and getting feedback from reality is vastly lower than the cost of other ways of trying new things in the field of governance.
Like David Brin says, it is good for each of us to remind ourselves that we or I am a member of a civilization. I take that to mean that for me to have any non-negligible hope of having a persistent (positive) effect on reality depends on my being a part of a sufficiently healthy civilization. There are some unhealthy aspects to American society, and I wish I could relocate to a society with a lower probability of my society's canceling out my efforts to improve the world. (According to my current understanding of the world, such a society probably does not currently exist.)
These sound interesting... but I assume they're politically controversial, and it may not be helpful for LessWrong to back a particular political view.
I think the specifics are controversial, but the idea isn't particularly so.
Like, arguing over which one is best is really political, but the idea of having a lot of states with experimental governments in order to see which ones are empirically more feasible isn't so much.
I'm tempted to say that any idea which could change the political landscape even in potential is going to wind up controversial if it gains any substantial momentum, even if it's not at the moment. Politics is proverbially full of people with a vested interest in the status quo, who'd have obvious incentives not to be friendly to experimental governments; less proverbially, though, it's also full of people so attached to one shiny ideology or another that they're more than willing to preemptively demonize anything which looks like it might disprove it.
A competitive government project would probably be dismissed as the pet project of a bunch of idealistic cranks for the first few years of its existence, before it returns any substantial results, but I'd expect it to meet violent opposition if it ever starts looking like, say, modified Trotskyism, or modified Objectivism, or $BIZARREIDEOLOGYOFCHOICE might actually be a good idea in practice. The worst opposition would be directed at the experimental implementation of the idea, of course, but the system that facilitated it would also catch a lot of flak.