5/14 11:08pm Currently the Town publishes one booklet that contains the Town Meeting Warrant and a second booklet that contains both the warrant articles and the Advisory Committee's recommendations. Wednesday (13-May-2009) evening's session of the Norfolk Town Meeting passed Article 67 which amends the Town's Bylaws so that instead of publishing the two booklets, the town would just publish one combined booklet. Before being passed, the article was amended to require publication on the web and to reinstate the requirement that the Advisory Committee's recommendations be available at least 7 days before the Annual Town Meeting or 14 days before a Special Town Meeting. During the discussion, someone asked whether it would be possible to publish the combined booklet on the web in such a way that residents could add their comments (either in support of, in opposition to, or asking questions) about any article. The Town Moderator responded that he thought that was a good suggestion and he would explore whether the Town Moderator's web page could be used to host such a discussion about the warrant articles. In a subsequent private conversation with the Town Moderator, he said that he would like to encourage active participation by town residents however he can, including discussion on the town website. But he pointed out that is constrained by the Town's website, over which he has no direct control, and which is currently a static website with some searching as its only interactive function (of which I'm aware). Article 67 commits the town to publishing the warrant articles and Advisory Committee's recommendations on the web. Nothing more than that was promised. But I interpreted what I heard as a statement that a good faith effort would be made to see if some support for discussion of the articles and recommendations by town residents could be added. In view of the budget situation, I suspect there won't be any money for developing a new web-based discussion system. Fortunately, there is some expert programming talent in town. I suspect a new web-based discussion system could be developed by volunteers - possible by modifying and configuring open-source projects. I would be willing to work on such a project. Assuming that it could be run on the existing town web server, other town-owned computers, or donated computers, it might be possible to develop a new web-based discussion system at almost no cost to the town. I have some thoughts about how I'd like a facility for discussing warrant articles and the Advisory Committee's recommendations to work. Even though nothing may come of it, I'd like to start a discussion here about kind of a facility we'd ideally like to have. I'll await a response from the Norfolknet webmaster about whether we may work on system requirements here, and if so, how he'd prefer we do it. - DR Norfolknet.com your community, on-line